THE EVOLUTION OF LOCUS STANDI: ANALYSING THE EMERGNCE OF PIL IN INDIA

The term ‘‘Public Interest Litigation’’ isn't Indian in origin. It was borrowed from American legal practice, where it served a fairly narrow purpose: giving legal voice to groups the system had effectively, i.e. for the poor, racial minorities, consumers with no organised representation, and citizens worried about environmental damage. What happened to the idea once it reached India, though, is really the more interesting story, and that's what this paper sets out to trace. Justice Krishna Iyer is usually credited with planting the seed, in the 1976 case Mumbai Kamagar Sabha v. Abdul Thai. Since the doctrine didn't really prove itself until Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar in 1979. That, this reformative case led to provide the rights to the undertrial prisoners into public view and, on the strength of a right to speedy trial the Court more or less carved out on the spot, led to over 40,000 of them being released. Later cases built on this. In Bandhua Mukti Morcha, for instance, the Court flipped the usual burden of proof on the employer now had to prove labour wasn't bonded, rather than the worker proving it was. Around the same period, in the Asiad Workers case, Justice P.N. Bhagwati ruled that a worker paid below minimum wage didn't need to wade through the labour commissioner or lower courts first, they could go straight to the Supreme Court. There are, of course, procedural boundaries to all this. A PIL can be filed under Article 32 (Supreme Court) or Article 226 (High Court) of the Constitution, or under Section 133 of the Criminal Procedure Code before a Magistrate. But it can only be filed against the State‘ ‘meaning government bodies, municipal authorities, and other entities falling within the Article 12 definition of ‘‘State’’ and never against a private party. What ties all of this together is a quieter, more structural shift: the old, rigid rule of locus standi, which kept people from approaching a court on someone else's behalf, gradually broke down. In its place emerged a judiciary willing to act as more than a neutral referee, that took an active role in questions of social justice, whether the issue at hand was custodial abuse, environmental harm, or administrative failure.