Supreme Court deals with 'mushroom growth' of PILs; 189 out of 228 pleas listed for Monday challenge CAA

Ever since Justice U U Lalit took charge as the 49th CJI, the Supreme Court has been busy dealing with a heavy influx of PILs, with the pending ones being listed along with the freshly filed PILs. 

On September 12 (Monday), as many as 228 PILs are listed for hearing before 15 benches and out of these, 205 are listed in the CJI’s court. Of these 205, 189 challenge the constitutional validity of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and have been clubbed together under one item, reports Times of India. 

The CJI-led bench will hear tomorrow the batch of petitions challenging the validity of CAA which seeks to grant citizenship to non-Muslim migrants who came here from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan on or before December 31, 2014.   

While refusing to stay the operation of the law, the top court had on December 18, 2019, issued notices to the Centre on the pleas. As per the list of businesses uploaded on the apex court website, a bench comprising Chief Justice Uday Umesh Lalit and Justice S Ravindra Bhat has posted over 200 petitions, including the lead plea of the Indian Union of Muslim League, for hearing on Monday. 

On an average, every bench in the Supreme Court hears 60 items each day, which include several petitions clubbed under one item. So, each item ends up getting less than five minutes of judicial attention.

It is not unusual that the JID-led bench hears the maximum number of PILs in the Supreme Court. However, the count has sharply increased in the past two weeks with as many as 76 pleas being listed before the Supreme Court on September 5 and the CJI bench hearing 32 of them. 

In June this year, the Supreme Court had expressed concern over the "mushroom growth" of public interest litigations and said frivolous PILs should be nipped in the bud so that the developmental activities are not affected.

A vacation bench of Justices B R Gavai and Hima Kohli observed while dismissing petitions against construction activities at the famed Shree Jagannath temple in Puri. The top court said most of the petitions are either publicity interest litigations or personal interest litigation.