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PILs are not a burden on courts. Here’s what data says

If PILs don't burden the courts but demonstrate unparalleled effectiveness in remedying failures of the State, one needs to make a much stronger case for depriving citizens of this route to enforce their rights.

On the second day of the Sabarimala hearing, the Centre asked the Supreme Court to do away with PILs as a concept altogether. The Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, drawing on his daily experience in Court Room No. 1, pushed back, claiming the court was cautious and admitted only a scant number of applications. Academia and media have, once again, picked sides and chosen to battle out the propriety of PIL jurisprudence.

Ideological battles on either side are unavoidable. What is loudly absent from this debate, however, is data.  Do PILs impose a significant work burden on Indian courts? What kind of litigants are forced to use the PIL route? What are they generally asking for? Do they typically succeed or fail? Debates on retaining or abolishing PILs—a long-standing feature of the Indian justice delivery system—are incomplete until these basic questions are answered. For if PILs consume disproportionate judicial time and filter down to rare wins, the system must ask how it can disincentivise frivolous filings. If, on the other hand, PILs constitute a negligible share of the docket but demonstrate unparalleled effectiveness in remedying failures of the State, one needs to make a much stronger case for depriving citizens of this route to enforce their rights.   

To demonstrate that a basic data-backed analysis is not out of reach, we look at 3,190 PIL filings before the Bombay High Court over the past half-decade from TheProfesseer’s dataset. We analyse this data to answer precisely the questions we asked above: namely, the impact of PILs on workload,  litigant profiles, subject matter of PILs, and success rates. An informed position on the Centre’s call for abolition or the Supreme Court’s defence of caution must be grounded in a nationwide empirical analysis of the kind we demonstrate here. 

How are PILs different?

In principle, the unique distinction between a PIL and a general petition before the Supreme Court or High Courts is a ‘diluted locus standi‘. This means that any public-spirited individual, irrespective of whether their rights were affected directly, may approach the court and seek justice. The executive has argued over the years that this loosened standing dilutes judicial processes and encourages extra-constitutional........

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