The Madras High Court on Friday imposed costs of ₹10,000 on a lawyer for filing two public interest litigation petitions — one seeking a direction to the Centre to issue bank loans for ₹25,000 each with subsidy and minimum interest and another seeking COVID-19 relief fund of ₹12,500 each to all poor families in the State.
Justices M. Sathyanarayanan and Pushpa Sathyanarayana directed the petitioner Iyyanar Chinniah to deposit the money in favour of the Cancer Institute in Chennai and report compliance by May 19. The order was passed after hearing Assistant Solicitor General G. Karthikeyan and Reserve Bank of India counsel Chevanan Mohan.
Observing that they were not inclined to entertain these kind of frivolous cases, the judges said, they were imposing costs on the lawyer to dissuade him and also others from filing such cases in the future without following the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court for preferring public interest litigation petitions.
The judges also recorded the submission of the ASG that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had recently announced an economic stimulus package worth about ₹20 lakh crore and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had been providing the details of the package for the last few days and yet the petitioner had come up with the present cases.
Mr. Karthikeyan contended that the two PIL petitions had been filed solely for publicity and not with any public interest in mind.
