Pragmatic and realistic had been the Chief Justice of India when he asserted that the Supreme Court had no magical medicine to cure all ailments ~ essentially an effort to curb frivolous Public Interest Litigation. No less realistic is the public perception of the higher judiciary in general, and the apex court in particular, being the proverbial “court of last resort”. For many of the issues sought to be redressed via the PIL route ought to have been resolved by other instruments of the Republic, and the courts being as clogged as they are only reflects the failure of the legislature and the executive to deliver their mandated duty in a democratic welfare state. Their Lordships are now required to fill increasing breaches in the governance apparatus: a telling case in point being a bench headed by Chief Justice JS Khehar having recently made some scathing observations on the failure to address core issues of farm distress. Every legislature has its share of ‘kisans’, and while they do wield a certain political clout they have failed to coerce the executive into positive action to avert the distress situations that are causing farmers to take their own lives.

While “orders” are awaited, the observations of the court are hard-hitting. In their own version of the time-tested maxim that prevention is better than cure, the bench was constrained to observe that the government was going along in a “wrong direction”. Asking for a policy roadmap, the court declared “this issue is of extreme importance. Tentatively we feel that you are going in a wrong direction. Farmers take loans from banks, and when they are unable to repay, they commit suicide. The remedy to the problem is not to pay money to farmers after the suicide, but you should have schemes to prevent this.” Their Lordships noted that “farmers’ suicides have been happening for so many decades, and it is surprising that no action has been taken to address the causes behind suicides”. The bench, which also comprised Justices DY Chandrachud and SK Kaul, noted that farmers were always at the receiving end: a bumper crop caused prices to crash, they suffered in times of drought or flood, “if the matter is moved on a right track a lot can be achieved.” The court declined to comment on the specifics of the several schemes listed by the Additional Solicitors General, but Counsel for the petitioners contended that the schemes were seldom implemented efficiently. There may have been nothing particularly “new” in the deliberations ~ except the forum. It should have been the legislature not the courtroom in which farmers’ problems ought to have been resolved. Conditions are thus fertilised for “judicial overreach”.