Chennai: “The purpose of a public interest litigation petition is not to get one’s name in the newspaper, but to do some groundwork and acquire expertise in the field before the jurisdiction invoked under the PIL,” the Madras high court observed. The first bench comprising Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana, before which a PIL filed by a junior advocate, G. Sivagami of Villivakkam, came up for hearing on Thursday, said, “This seems to have been completely absent in the present case”.
The petitioner, Sivagami, who is also a law student, sought a direction to the authorities to formulate a policy to regulate the erection of borewells. She said that she was shocked to read a news item in the Deccan Chronicle dated April 13, 2015, about the death of a two-and-a-half-year old child, Thamizharasan after he fell inside an abandoned borewell in Arcot on April 12.
While replying to a writ petition filed in August 2014 before the Madras high court, state government gave an assurance to the court that appropriate rules would be framed and notified in a month. But it neither did this nor compensated parents of the deceased children as directed by the high court. Sivagami alleged that such incidents were continuing due to the inaction of government to formulate rules for the acts.
The bench said that the unfortunate death of the child was the direct result of the negligence of the landowner, an uncle of the child. The government was not to be blamed. The government pleader, in his counter affidavit, submitted that rules for the acts were already in force. Concurring with this, the bench said that necessary enquiries regarding this required to be made before making averments in the petition and closed the petition.
