Q.Citizens petition (PIL) to remove slums for city beautification vs. slum residents' right-to-life argument. Write a judgement deciding if the PIL involves 'public interest.'

Both sides raise a genuine "public interest" claim, so the judgment has to balance beautification against the residents' right to life rather than pick one side outright. …

The scenario: a group of citizens has filed a PIL asking the municipal authorities to remove slums and beautify the city to attract investors, arguing this serves the "public interest." The slum residents have responded that removal without alternative arrangements would violate their right to life, and that this right is more central to genuine public interest than a cosmetically clean city.

Reasoning. This chapter's own account of how PIL developed is directly relevant here. PIL exists, in the words of Justice Bhagwati, because "the problems of the poor... are qualitatively different" and require "a different kind of judicial approach" — the ordinary adversarial procedure, which assumes both sides can argue their case on equal footing, would leave the poor unable to enforce their rights at all. Slum residents facing eviction are exactly the kind of disadvantaged group PIL was built to protect, not to be weighed against as a mere inconvenience to a beautification plan brought by better-resourced petitioners.

At the same time, this Court does not deny that a city has a legitimate interest in orderly planning, sanitation, and economic development — attracting investment can, in principle, benefit the wider public too, including residents of the very areas being redeveloped, through better infrastructure and services. The question is not whether beautification can ever be pursued, but whether it can be pursued by simply removing people from their homes with nowhere else to go.

A right to life that offers no protection against being rendered homeless is not much of a right at all. "Public interest" cannot mean the interest of some members of the public (investors, and those who prefer a tidier skyline) purchased at the direct expense of the fundamental rights of another group of the public (the slum residents) — particularly when that second group is precisely the group least able to protect itself through the ordinary political or legal process. …