Q.Find out details about at least one case involving a PIL and study how it served public interest.

Hussainara Khatoon vs Bihar (1979) is a real, well-documented early PIL from this chapter's own material. …

The case: In 1979, newspapers reported that a large number of undertrial prisoners in Bihar had already spent longer in jail awaiting trial than they would have spent behind bars had they actually been convicted and sentenced for the offences they were accused of. An advocate, moved by these reports, filed a petition — not on behalf of a single client who had approached them, but effectively on behalf of an entire class of prisoners who had no means of filing such a petition themselves. The Supreme Court agreed to hear it.

How it served public interest: This was one of the earliest cases in which the Supreme Court accepted a petition from someone other than the directly aggrieved party, precisely because the matter — the prolonged, unjust detention of poor and often illiterate undertrial prisoners — was a genuine issue of public interest rather than a private grievance. It gave a voice, through the PIL mechanism, to prisoners who were by definition confined, without resources, and in no position to hire a lawyer or navigate the ordinary legal process to challenge their own detention. The case became one of the founding examples of Public Interest Litigation in India, and it is credited with drawing national attention to the specific problem of undertrials languishing in jail beyond what their eventual sentence would have been — an ear …