MUNICIPAL COUNCIL RATLAM Vs. VARDICHAN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) 'It is procedural rules', as this appeal proves, which infuse life into substantive rights, which activate them to make them effective'. Here, before us, is what looks like a pedestrian quasi-criminal litigation under S. 133 Cr. P. C., where the Ratlam Municipality - the appellant - challenges the sense and soundness of the High Court's affirmation of the trial Court's order directing the construction of drainage facilities and the like, which has spiralled up to this court. The truth is that a few propound issues of processual jurisprudence of great strategic significance to our legal system face us and we must zero-in on them as they involve problems of access to justice for the people beyond the blinkered rules of 'standing' of British Indian vintage. If the centre of gravity of justice is to shift, as the Preamble to the Constitution mandates, from the traditional individualism of locus standi to the community orientation of public interest litigation, these issues must be considered. In that sense, the case before us between the Ratlam Municipality and the citizens of a ward, is a path-finder in the field of people's involvement in the justicing process, sans which as Prof. Sikes points out, (1) the system may 'crumble under the burden of its own insensitivity'. The key question we have to answer is whether by affirmative action a court can compel a statutory body to carry out its duty to the community by constructing sanitation facilities at great cost and on a time-bound basis. At issue is the coming of age of that branch of public law bearing on community actions and the court's power to force public bodies under public duties to implement specific plans in response to public grievances.

(2.) The circumstances of the case are typical and overflow the particular municipality and the solutions to the key questions emerging from the matrix of facts are capable of universal application, especially in the Third word humanscape of silent subjection of groups of people to squalor and of callous public bodies habituated to deleterious inaction. The Ratlam Municipal town, like many Indian urban centres, is populous with human and sub-human species, is punctuated with affluence and indigence in contrasting co-existence, and keeps public sanitation a low priority item, what with cess-pools and filth menacing public health. Ward No. 12, New Road, Ratlam town is an area where prosperity and poverty live as strange bedfellows. The rich have bungalows and toilets, the poor live on pavements and litter the street, with human excreta because they use roadsides as latrines in the absence of public facilities. And the city fathers being too busy with other issues to bother about the human condition, cesspools and stinks, dirtied the place beyond endurance which made the well-to-do citizens protest, but the crying demand for basic sanitation and public drains fell on deaf ears. Another contributory cause to the insufferable situation was the discharge from the Alcohol plant of malodorous fluids into the public street. In this lawless locale, mosquitoes found a stagnant stream of stench so hospitable to breeding and flourishing, with no municipal agent disturbing their stinging music at human expense. The local denizens, driven by desperation, at long last, decided to use the law and call the bluff of the municipal body's bovine indifference to its basic obligations under S. 123 of the M. P. Municipalities Act, 1961 (the Act, for short). That provision casts a mandate:

(3.) The Magistrate, whose activist application of S.133, Cr. P.C. for the larger purpose of making the Ratlam municipal body do its duty and abate the nuisance by affirmative action, has our appreciation. He has summed up the concrete facts which may be usefully quoted in portions: