Public Interest Litigation In India – Pitfalls Facing Multinationals*

My talk focuses on how the Judiciary itself can become a fraught circumstance. Not an underdeveloped, intimidated, cowed down or controlled judiciary but a free, robust, independent and bold judiciary. For, in India the opposite is true.

Indian judiciary is perhaps the most empowered and activist judiciary in the world. It can strike down legislation. It can strike down governmental policies and indeed it is not unknown for it to mandate new policies or prescribe policies through judge made law. In a public address in 1998, Lord Woolf, the then Master of Rolls (England) expressed his "gasping admiration" for the work done in the immediate past by the Indian higher courts and added that attempts by the British judiciary to exercise control over the government "are nothing compared to the kind of work, the Courts in India have done."