'Court is not a dumping ground': Allahabad High Court on PILs being filed by Law students and their failure to pursue matters thereafter

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Dealing with a Public Interest Litigation filed by law students belonging to different Universities and law colleges who failed to follow up on the matter, the Allahabad High Court observed that "the Court cannot be made a dumping ground."

Noting that the PIL might have been the result of a project during students' winter internship, the bench comprising Chief Justice Rajesh Bindal and Justice Piyush Agrawal stated, 

"This is not a case in isolation. In fact, during Summer or Winter, this Court is flooded with public interest litigation filed by the students of different colleges, who visited Prayagraj during these vacations for their internship."

Court said the practice can not be allowed for pushing all these reports and filing a petition on the basis thereof, when the petitioners, who filed this petition in person, are not available to assist this Court properly to take issues to the logical end.

Regarding the instant case, Court noted that when the petition was filed the petitioner students were studying in different semesters and had joined Human Rights Legal Network Office at Prayagraj for their Winter internship.

Court said, "May be, as a part of their project, they had visited certain places to examine the ICDS scheme, prepared report and filed the present petition on the basis thereof."

"It seems that they were interested only to secure certain marks for preparation of reports during their internship," Court added. 

Further, Court held that for these kinds of incidents, Universities - law colleges, who assigned these kinds of projects to the law students, are equally responsible.

Court also added that "the duty is equally cast on the Human Rights Legal Network, Prayagraj, which is manned by able Advocates, under the guidance of whom the petitioners had done their Winter internship."

Accordingly, before proceeding with the matter, Court deemed it appropriate to issue notice to Human Rights Legal Network, Prayagraj, Advocate Prabal Pratap, Adv. Charlie Prakash, Chanakya National Law University (Bihar), Bharati Vidyapeeth, Bharati Vidyapeeth Bhavan (Pune) and SVKM's NMIMS University (Madhya Pradesh). 

The bench posted the matter on May 12, 2022 for further hearing. 

Case Title: Nishant Chandra and others v. Union of India and others