People's Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India (1982)

Once standing is relaxed, a second question arises immediately, and examiners ask it as a short note: what kind of proceeding is a public interest petition? If it is ordinary adversarial litigation with a substituted plaintiff, the court will treat it as a contest between two sides and decide it on the pleadings. If it is something else, the whole procedure changes.

PUDR supplies the characterisation this course relies on, and it links public interest litigation back to Module 1: it is a strategic arm of the legal aid movement, which is the same idea the Court described in Centre of Legal Research and which the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 later made a statutory function of its authorities.

The course does not set out the facts of the petition; it uses the case for its statement of what public interest litigation is and why it exists. Treat it as an authority on the nature of the jurisdiction rather than as a facts problem, and do not invent the detail.

Public interest litigation is brought to vindicate the public interest in ensuring that violations of the rights of large numbers of poor or disadvantaged people do not go unnoticed and unredressed. It is not adversarial litigation between two parties in the ordinary sense; it has been described as a strategic arm of the legal aid movement.

1. Start from the class, not the parties. The wrong complained of is suffered by a group who cannot litigate — victims of exploitation or oppression, or persons denied constitutional rights, kept out by ignorance, poverty, destitution, helplessness, disability or social or economic disadvantage. A third person or social action group invokes the court's jurisdiction on their behalf.
2. Reject the adversarial model as the whole picture. Ordinary litigation is a contest in which each side looks after its own interest. Here the petitioner has no personal stake, so the proceeding is better understood as a collaborative effort by the petitioner, the State and the court to secure the rights of vulnerable sections.
3. Connect it to legal aid. Litigation for the poor is one arm of a programme that also includes legal literacy, camps and Lok Adalats; calling it strategic places it in that programme rather than treating it as a procedural novelty.

It opens the what is PIL limb of the question, and it is the second step in the four-case sequence: S.P. Gupta on standing, PUDR on nature, Bandhua Mukti Morcha on procedure, M.C. Mehta on remedies. It is also the bridge to Module 1: cite it when asked why public interest litigation appears among the functions of legal services authorities, and pair it with Centre of Legal Research, which describes a strategic legal aid programme as including the encouragement of public interest litigation.

It disposes of the argument that a public interest petition is merely ordinary litigation brought by a stranger, and the expectation that the court will sit back and let two sides fight.

It does not decide standing, procedure or remedies — those are the other three cases — and it does not lay down any test for identifying a genuine public interest petition as against a frivolous one. This course does not cover the later decisions on frivolous public interest litigation; if the question calls for them, say that they exist and do not invent their contents.