ON APRIL 8, 2026, while arguing before the nine-judge Bench in the Sabrimala reference, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta urged the Supreme Court to remove Public Interest Litigation (‘PIL’) as a concept altogether. Questioning the relevance of such petitions, he asked, “In this day and age, why should such PILs be entertained?” According to the Centre, many PILs now being filed were motivated and at the behest of undisclosed interests.
Chief Justice of India Surya Kant responded saying that the courts were cautious. That same day, Justice B.V. Nagarathna observed that the petition challenging the temple entry practice should not have been fit to be entertained in the first place as no genuine devotee, according to her, would have challenged such a practice.
“Public Interest Litigation has now become Private Interest Litigation, Publicity Interest Litigation, Paisa Interest Litigation and Political Interest Litigation,” Justice Nagarathna observed on May 5, adding that, “all are called PILs, but we entertain only real and genuine PILs”
There was a certain difference in the tenor between the statements made by the judges and the position advanced by the Solicitor General. While the judges acknowledged that only genuine and bona fide PILs must be encouraged, the Solicitor General, on the other hand, called for their complete abrogation. This is not the first time the Centre has questioned the utility of PILs. Back in 2020 too, Mehta had told the Court that “professional PIL shops” must be locked down.
Almost fifty years after PILs were introduced, this exchange opened up some urgent questions.Should the relaxed locus standi principles, that gave PILs their democratic character, be wound back to their original form? Is the misuse of PILs really as widespread as it is made out to be? If yes, what does misuse actually consist of? Political weaponisation, judicial overreach, frivolous petitions, or something else entirely? Finally, is the answer abolition, or is there a more calibrated case for reform?
A brief history of PILs and the conundrums of locus standi
Public Interest Litigation emerged in the late 1970s in the aftermath of the Emergency, marking a significant departure from traditional adjudication. Many citizens in India lacked the access to courts with widespread poverty and illiteracy, which prompted the Supreme Court to relax the rules of locus standi and simplify procedural requirements for filing petitions.
A central question underlying the PIL debate concerns the very function of the judiciary. Is the judiciary’s role primarily to preserve constitutional and legal order in the larger public interest by keeping the executive and legislature within the bounds of law? Or is it mainly to protect individual rights by preventing unlawful encroachments?
In 1971, Singaporean legal academic and lawyer, Thio Su Mien, in her book ‘Locus Standi and Judicial Review’ wrote that the first understanding views courts as “the final arbiters of what is legal and illegal.” From this perspective, strict rules of locus standi become unnecessary as they obstruct the judiciary’s broader constitutional function. By contrast, if the judicial process is understood principally as a mechanism for protecting private rights, judicial intervention becomes limited to situations where individual rights are directly violated.
In Mumbai Kamgar Sabha v. Abdulbhai Faizullabhai (1976), Justice VR Krishna Iyer wrote:
“Our adjectival branch of jurisprudence, by and large, deals not with sophisticated litigants but the rural poor, the urban lay and the weaker societal segments for whom law will be an added terror if technical misdescriptions and deficiencies in drafting pleadings and setting out the cause title create a secret weapon to non-suit a party…Test litigations, representative actions, pro bono publico and like broadened forms of legal proceedings are in keeping with the current accent on justice to the common man.”
Three years later with Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar (1979) came what is widely regarded as the first PIL, though the Court itself never explicitly used the term. Finally, in S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981), the Court formally theorised PIL which ensued the liberalisation of locus standi principles. The judiciary imagined itself as capable of policing “the corridors of power” and addressing forms of oppression that could be governmental, corporate, financial, or commercial. At the same time the Court also attempted to place limits on this expansive doctrine. The judgment in S.P. Gupta read:
“...cases may arise where there is undoubtedly public injury by the act or omission of the State or a public authority but such act or omission also causes a specific legal injury to an individual or to a specific class or group of individuals. In such cases, a member of the public having sufficient interest can certainly maintain an action challenging the legality of such act or omission, but if the person on specific class or group of persons who are primarily injured as a result of such act or omission, do not wish to claim any relief and accept such act or omission willingly and without protest, the member of the public who complains of a secondary public injury cannot maintain the action…”
The Court in Balwant Singh Chaufal (2010), dealt with the origin and development of PIL and broadly divided it into three ‘phases.’ Academic discourse has similarly employed the language of ‘phases’ to map PIL's trajectory. However, these phases overlap considerably and resist the neat periodisation they are presented as. Notwithstanding these limitations, and at the risk of oversimplification, the table below, drawn from academic Surya Deva’s work, offers a useful orienting framework for understanding how PIL evolved. According to him across the three phases, at least four variables shift: who initiated the PIL; what subject matter or cause it pursued; against whom relief was sought; and how the judiciary responded.
In the first ‘phase,’ some key rulings addressed the independence of the judiciary and rights of prisoners, bonded labourers, women inmates in protective homes, and other vulnerable communities who lacked the resources to approach courts.
In the second ‘phase,’ some major environmental litigations targeted pollution of the Ganga and Yamuna, industrial emissions near the Taj Mahal, or traffic and vehicular pollution in Delhi; many at the behest of M.C. Mehta. The Court was also proactive to address sexual harassment at workplace and female foeticide.
PILs from this stage, and bleeding into the third, were deployed as a mechanism for institutional accountability, corruption-free administration, good governance, and the general accountability of the Government. Some key rulings targeted the Jain hawala payoffs to politicians and bureaucrats, the defalcation of public funds in Bihar's Animal Husbandry Department, the Taj Heritage Corridor land scam, and the independence of adjudicating authorities under PMLA. Figures such as Vineet Narain and Prashant Bhushan were among those at the forefront of driving this wave of accountability litigation.
The third ‘phase’ brought a wave of slum demolitions, zero tolerance zones for beggars, hawkers and rickshaw-pullers, traffic regulation, pollution control, and enforcement of zoning laws.
Around the 2010s, institutional fatigue prompted the Court to pass several directions to encourage genuine litigation and curb the abuse of the process in Balwant Singh Chauful. These were: (i) courts must encourage bona fide PIL and discourage petitions filed for extraneous considerations; (ii) every High Court should frame uniform procedural rules for PILs instead of leaving procedure to individual judges; (iii) courts must prima facie verify the credentials of the petitioner; (iv) judges should satisfy themselves about the correctness of the contents of the petition; (v) courts must ensure that substantial public interest is genuinely involved before proceeding; (vi) matters involving greater urgency and gravity should receive priority; (vii) PILs should seek redress for genuine public injury rather than advance personal, political, or oblique motives; and (viii) frivolous petitions filed by “busybodies” should be discouraged through exemplary costs and other deterrent measures.
In the 2010s, the PIL jurisdiction continued to deal with a range of issues from triple talaq and 2018 Sabrimala temple entry case to coal block allocations, linking Aadhaar to voter ID cards, seeking implementation of Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955 in Assam, thereby the National Register Citizens in Assam, and to issue directions requiring cinema halls across the country to play the national anthem, sprawling in scope into questions of governance, morality, nationalism, and public order.
Writing in 2019, legal scholar Gautam Bhatia called this the ‘fourth-phase’ of PILs:
“The use of the court as a vehicle, through public interest litigation and the procedural and substantive flexibilities that it allows, to restrict or curtail individual rights guaranteed under Part III of the Constitution, and/or to achieve political goals that are blocked by normal political routes, and/or to stymie existing legal proceedings or bypass statutory process.”
According to Bhatia, the relaxation of locus standi, originally intended to enable representation for those unable to approach courts themselves, had effectively resulted in a situation where virtually anyone could file a PIL on virtually any issue without demonstrating the existence of an affected party unable to access justice.
Since 2020, several major constitutional, communal, and political disputes have continued to reach the courts through the PIL jurisdiction, from demolitions of mosques, to the Pegasus spyware case, to Article 370 challenges.
Lack of stakeholder consultation, growing reliance on amici curiae, judicial overreach into governance, and politically motivated petitions have emerged as criticisms of modern PIL jurisprudence.
Poorly drafted petitions filed with ulterior motives, now called ‘ambush’ petitions have received their share of criticism. A prominent recent instance, as pointed out by journalists and commentators, was a petition filed by two lawyers against the Vantara private zoo. Based on this, an SIT was formed in the Supreme Court to investigate some significant concerns raised regarding wildlife trafficking. The SIT not only concluded its findings in record speed, but supplied complete approval for the project, despite mounting evidence by global conservationists.
Once a court has dismissed a petition on a question, a subsequent petitioner raising a well-grounded challenge on the same matter may find the door already closed. In 2021, though the Supreme Court ruled that the principles of res judicata should not bar access to justice in such cases, ambush PILs are invariably wielded as a precedent and they also shape public perception of an issue.
While it is claimed that PIL in India has been a part of constitutional litigation and not civil litigation, PILs in criminal matters carry consequences that are different from those in civil, as reopening criminal proceedings becomes the question of the liberty and reputation of individuals. This also means that such persons may be subjected to renewed litigation. Recognising these concerns, the Supreme Court has exercised caution while determining the maintainability of PILs in criminal matters.
According to data from the Law Ministry, over 3,500 PILs are currently pending before the Supreme Court alone.
Despite these problems, several lawyers, civil society and scholars argue that abolishing PIL altogether may be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
With these tensions in mind, The Leaflet reached out to a few advocates to understand how they view the state of PIL jurisprudence today.
Should PILs be abolished altogether?
In the written submissions for Sabarimala Reference, the Union pointed to a catastrophic expansion of the court's docket to urge the Supreme Court to reconsider PIL jurisdiction altogether. Improvements in legal aid mechanisms, including the National Legal Services Authority and District LSAs, as well as the introduction of structures such as e-filing were cited to argue that more citizens are now better placed. But to what extent is this true?
One commentator pointed out that there had been a 38 percent drop in paralegal volunteers in legal aid between 2019 and 2025, and that Lok Adalats showed low disposal rate.
Speaking to The Leaflet, Mohd. Kumail Haider, an advocate on record at the Allahabad High Court noted that he was “utterly shocked” hearing arguments in the Sabarimala Reference against PILs given the state of governance in Uttar Pradesh.
“There are still rural areas and vulnerable communities without reliable access to the internet, phones, or legal infrastructure.” Claims that PIL is no longer necessary because access to information has improved, in his view, reflect a limited understanding of the realities many communities continue to face.
Talha Abdul Rahman, advocate on record at the Supreme Court of India, explained that courts should be accessible to people who need it, “Your assessment of need is extraneous to how I perceive my need to be…Society rests on empathy, and empathy requires one person to represent the cause of others,” he added.
Indira Unninayar, advocate-on-record at the Supreme Court, maintained that representative litigation continues to remain necessary and important for many marginalised communities and sections of the urban poor who may lack the resources, security, or ability to approach courts themselves. “I really don't think the so-called abuse of PILs is as rampant as it is made out to be.,” she said.
She compared broad generalisations of PIL misuse to the sweeping generalisations that women routinely misuse laws. Some petitions may indeed be frivolous, but such exceptions, according to her, should not overshadow the structural realities and inherent concerns that gave birth to PIL jurisdiction in the first place.
The communities PIL was designed to protect, she suggested, were also the ones being targeted by the system. “Today, everything is very right wing also, isn't it? The system caters to crony capitalism, and the rich. So if a PIL by definition is to support the causes of the marginalised, you are going to have a huge pushback.”
Sunpreet Singh, an advocate practicing Punjab and Haryana High Court, who had used PILs to ask for separate cells for transgender persons in prisons and the implementation of support schemes for poor prisoners noted that in several instances “states are not even aware of those laws.” PILs then became the mechanism through which departments are made to function.
Should locus standi be relaxed?
While an analysis by The Print revealed that 77 percent of litigants in the Bombay High Court, between 2021 and 2025, were private individuals and PILs made up only 0.25 percent of the High Court’s docket, a forthcoming paper in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, which analysed 750 reported PIL cases in the last forty five years in the Supreme Court, reveals that only in ten percent of the cases the litigants came from poor and disadvantaged sections.
“Every legal case is political, whether it is a bail matter for a poor individual or a high-profile case,” Rahman explained to The Leaflet, “You cannot divorce the question of politics from any legal question because these matters always affect a large number of people. To say that courts should not accept a petition because it has political ramifications or to assume that it is a…‘Trojan horse’ for another agenda…is something that I wouldn't subscribe to.”
Rahman noted that while a petitioner having “substantial exposure and interest” in working on a specific issue should carry weight, while determining locus standi, in cases involving “gross” public harm, the question of locus standi should not even arise.
“Public interest matters are also to do with public trust issues,” said Unninayar. She was pointing to disputes involving voting procedures such as SIR and extraction or sale of natural resources. The question of who files a PIL, for her, is secondary to the question of what is being raised. “If I point out that there is a problem which is going to impact crores of people, it doesn't matter where it comes from.”
“Simply because a jurisdiction can be misused, cannot be a sole argument to throw away a jurisdiction,”said advocate Purbayan Chakraborty, who is one of the counsel in the Great Nicobar Project litigation in the Calcutta High Court. In an order last month, Chief Justice of the High Court Sujoy Paul had held that the petitioner could not be denied locus standi merely on the ground that she was not residing in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The petition in that case was considered particularly appropriate because of the petitioner, Meena Gupta’s institutional experience and subject-matter expertise. Gupta had been former Secretary in the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in West Bengal and had long been associated with issues concerning tribal communities. Chakraborty explained that petitioners like Meena Gupta can “render effective assistance to the court”, and the adjudicatory process benefits from their engagement.
What reforms can improve the PIL system today?
According to the law ministry, 3,500 PILs are pending in the Supreme Court; 698 of them pending for over 10 years. Last year, 570 were admitted- the highest number. With over 90,000 total cases pending before the Supreme Court, PILs account for less than four percent of the docket. Academic Pranav Verma argues, in his recent paper, that there remains a huge gap between the number of PILs filed in the court, and the number of PILs admitted, and disposed. Once accepted or admitted for regular hearing, nearly 38 percent of all PIL cases are dismissed on merits. The remaining 62 percent are either allowed substantially or allowed in part.
Indira Unninayar explained that the backlog of PILs is only one part of the larger structural issue of judicial backlog. Over five crore cases are pending across courts in India. Courts, she suggested, need to prioritise matters more carefully, pointing to excessive judicial focus on certain cases over others. She also proposed greater use of the Court’s powers under Article 128 of the Constitution to appoint retired judges to assist in clearing case backlogs, instead of permitting pendency to continue rising.
Purbayan Chakraborty told The Leaflet that in High Courts, while PILs are typically heard by Division Benches, often in the Chief Justice’s court, in practice they are not always allotted adequate hearing time, which usually makes it difficult for PIL matters to be taken up efficiently.
Advocate Haider stressed the need for lawyers and activists to remain connected with grassroots communities. “That gap has to be curtailed for the serious issues of PIL to emerge and not the superficial ones,” he said.
He also suggested greater training for advocates practising in constitutional courts on both what kinds of PILs should be filed and what ought not to be brought before courts.
For Rahman, advocates, who lack direct contact with the marginalised should not be the petitioners in PIL cases. “Their role is to represent a cause as an advocate [rather than to be the one personally challenging a law],” he said. He also said one of the regressive approaches that needs to be contemplated is trial courts being “literally castrated” and restricted to mere enforcement of laws. “The Constitution, under Article 32(3), specifically contemplates that the courts should be accessible to the last person and poorest of the poor.” But this provision, he says, remains "virtually a dead letter.”
The solution according to him is not only the empowerment of the lower judiciary but also strengthening institutions like the National Human Rights Commission so that people do not have to approach the courts. Rahman explained that true accountability occurs when each institution functions strictly within its own "realm" and jurisdiction rather than "cooperating" to achieve a single outcome.
The future of the PIL
What makes the Solicitor General's call to abolish PIL altogether so difficult to take seriously is the government's selective relationship with the jurisdiction. Author Anuj Bhuwania recently pointed out that some of the outcomes the current government welcomes and endorses like triple talaq, or the NRC exercise in Assam were made possible specifically through PILs. Additionally, PILs have been stretched and weaponised by BJP leaders such as Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay.
Does this reveal that the push to abolish it altogether is less about procedural hygiene than about controlling which voices reach the court?
All the advocates who spoke to The Leaflet, maintained that PIL surely does require reform, but its abolition was not the solution.
There are legitimate criticisms associated with the jurisdiction that require structural response. But the leap from stating that some petitions lack a standing to calling for PIL abrogation altogether, will disproportionately silence the already silenced. The ‘phases’ PIL has passed through to reach what critics today call the weaponisation or misuse of jurisdiction, tells us more about the character of the institutions and interests that have animated at a given moment. There are different questions which we would then benefit from thinking about. Could greater grassroots and stakeholder engagement by petitioners produce litigation that is more representative and grounded? Would weighing a petitioner's sustained subject-matter engagement and proximity to the affected community reduce the jurisdiction's vulnerability to elite capture and ambush filings?
Some reforms are also hiding in plain sight. The directions laid down in Balwant Singh Chaufal already require courts to verify petitioner credentials and satisfy themselves of genuine public injury. Could their consistent and even-handed application, itself constitute meaningful reform? Since PIL jurisdiction under Article 32 is maintainable only where a fundamental right is at stake, should courts rigorously apply this threshold at the admission stage itself?
In 2014, academic Arun Thiruvengadam wrote, “Some progressives have implicitly suggested that what is required is a return to the original phase of PIL. In essence, they could be seen as demanding that a new generation of judges in the mould of Justices Iyer, Bhagwati, Chinappa Reddy and Desai be appointed to redeem the potential of PIL for progressive causes. I believe that such a view is both unrealistic and problematic.”
Thiruvengadam suggested that a renewed engagement with PILs is needed where judges abandon “command-and-control” strategies that mimic bureaucracies by laying down fixed, inflexible rules and legislative-like guidelines and instead, adopt a modest and facilitative role. Litigation, he also wrote, should be grounded in bottom-up strategies that genuinely represent the concerns of the actual clients and affected communities.
“To ‘abandon the site of legal intervention’, as has been suggested by some, would, in my view, be a mistake of monumental proportions,” Thiruvengadam wrote, “What is required of progressive communities, instead, is a fulsome re‐engagement with the enterprise of PIL with a view to correcting strategic errors of the past, and reclaiming ownership over its future.”
At its best, PIL is a tool to transform constitutional guarantees into enforceable protections for the marginalised. It represents a constitutional commitment to the idea that justice cannot be rationed by proximity, resources, or the ability to navigate procedural complexity. That commitment is worth defending.