Shauryaveer Chaudhry, Saher Gole & Devang Pandey

In this episode of the LSPR Podcast, Shauryaveer Chaudhry, Saher Nitin Gole, and Devang Pandey sit down with Professor Pranav Verma.

The discussion focuses on his research on 45 years of Public Interest Litigation in India. Professor Verma explains his empirical study of the Supreme Court’s PIL docket. He discusses the shift towards regulatory and environmental matters.

The conversation also examines continuing mandamus and judicial discretion. It explores the distinction between PIL and Social Action Litigation. The discussion concludes by considering the role of the Supreme Court in addressing socio-economic and regulatory issues.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Shauryaveer Chaudhry: Hello all, and welcome to yet another podcast of the Law School Policy Review. I’m Shauryaveer, a senior editor and I have Saher and Devang, two observers, with me here.

Today, we are joined by Professor Pranav Verma, an assistant professor at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore. His academic interests span constitutional, administrative and criminal law, with a particular focus on judicial processes and empirical legal research. He holds an LLM from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from NALSAR University of Law. His work has been published in leading journals and platforms, including the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Economic and Political Weekly, and the Journal of Asian Studies.

Now I’ll ask Saher to give a brief introduction on the piece we’ll be talking about today.

Saher Nitin Gole: Professor Pranav Verma’s latest piece, “Forty-Five Years of Public Interest Litigations in India”, hand codes nearly 750 reported PIL judgments and orders to show that the poor and disadvantaged, the groups that PILs were originally meant to serve, now occupy only 10% of the docket, displaced by regulatory matters and private disputes litigated in the garb of public interest. This follows from the very procedural innovation, the dilution of standing and relaxation of adversarial procedure, that were meant to democratize access.

Pranav Verma: Thank you so much. Shauryaveer, Saher, and Devang. Happy to be here.

Shauryaveer Chaudhry: Professor, methodologically, you use hand coding to classify 747 judgments and orders into different categories. You also used a simple empirical approach in your work on the essential religious practices. What is it about hand coding that you find particularly useful for legal scholarship, and why do you think it allows you to see that a more conventional doctrinal analysis would miss?

Pranav Verma: Thank you for that question, Shauryaveer. Let me try to answer that in two ways. One is, broadly, why take an empirical approach at all, because the question of hand coding then comes as a subset of why that particular way of doing an empirical work. And I think both questions are useful to look at here. Primarily, I think in fields where existing literature and scholarship have a tendency to make very broad systemic claims about what the legal system has become, or about what’s the very nature of the court when it makes certain kinds of intervention in a field. I think these are essentially empirical claims, and we can’t make these claims on the basis of a handful of cases. So, for instance, if we look at all the scholarship on the ERP, it focuses on the court’s rightful or wrong role as an arbiter in religious disputes. So, all of the scholarship is concentrating on the question: “Is this the court’s job to do?”

But if you bring an empirical reality into the picture and look at the claim that the ERP test actually fails in an overwhelming majority of cases when the plea is raised, that shifts the conversation from “Is this the court’s rightful role in the polity?” to the very scope of religious freedom.

Similarly, in cases of PILs, there’s a particular tendency in existing scholarship to make systemic claims about what PILs are, what is the very nature of the Supreme Court in its PIL jurisdiction. But all of them do so, and that’s true right from late 1970s to 80s to now, on the basis of a handful of cases that end up capturing the popular legal imagination. My only point there is that these broad systemic claims cannot be faithfully made without a reasonably comprehensive data set, and a reasonable attempt at an underlying corpus that paints a broader picture for us. So, actually, with the kind of empirical work both in this PIL piece and the ERP piece, as you would gather, hand coding is not very complicated in the sense that it requires technical know-how of LLMs and regression models, and how to code through Python, etc. This is more descriptive empirical work. But as I said, fields where little is known or where there’s a tendency to make broad systemic claims, even a descriptive empirical work can add great value to the discourse. So that is one of the reasons that I thought that you present at least a mirror to scholarship, to stakeholders in the system, that this is what the sense of field is. And then more causal inferences and more theorizing can follow. But until we engage with the data with some faith, with some reasonable data collection endeavour, that crucial first step is missing.

Now, coming to your question on hand coding more specifically, it is as descriptive as an empirical work can get, right? It’s useful because it allows one to look at an original data set, study it in some granular manner, and sub-categorize it. That’s where the value of hand coding really comes in, especially if that sub-categorization helps you to draw out further typology or see how a system is playing out with respect to multiple constituencies, explore its effects on a range of stakeholders, and explore the metrics that are revealed. I think for that, I have found hand coding to be particularly useful. Of course, it’s helped that the ERP data set was not even 100 cases as such. Here it’s about 750 cases, but with some discipline over some months, you can go through it. Of course, if the size of the data set increases, then you might be looking at more automated models of coding. But so far, I think it can serve good purpose in showing a certain mirror to scholarship. In this context, why that was helpful for me is because it helps to show what are the different constituencies in the court’s PIL dockets, and what that really tells us about the nature of the court itself, because there has been a particular context to the PIL debate that we do this in the name of the poor and disadvantaged. So, I thought really going into some granular classification of those who are in the PIL docket as something hand coding can add value to, would be a good first step.

Shauryaveer Chaudhry: Thank you for that, Professor. I think our audience who undergoes and conducts research will find this pretty useful.

You describe the Supreme Court in your piece as having become a regulatory court. You also talk about how this does not neatly fit into the western idea of separation of powers. Where, doctrinally do you think the constitutional limits of the regulatory role ought to lie? At what point does enforcing constitutional rights become judicial administration?

Pranav Verma: We would be in good stead if we begin with an acknowledgement that the strict separation of powers model, and that’s a descriptive claim again, has long been abandoned in the Indian context. There are arguments in favour of that, that we don’t follow a strict separation of powers here because the needs of our society are very different from the western societies. So, we need the court to take an activist turn. The only thing is that the justification of the dilution of a strict separation of powers has always been in the name of the poor and disadvantaged. The justification comes from the fact that the socio-economic realities of the Indian society are very different from an American society or from a European society. And when you’re faced with administrative inaction, those who are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, must be able to go to courts. And courts can’t, in good conscience, say that this is not a job. That’s at least what the argument is.

Now, as you could imagine, the legitimacy of the court performing this activist role is obviously sourced from this argument that we are doing it in the favor of a particular constituency. But if the court is using its PIL jurisdiction, and that’s one of the claims of the piece, not really to elevate the needs or even hear those suffering from socio-economic injustices, but to increasingly take on a regulatory turn, to increasingly hear private disputes that are brought to its doorstep as PILs, then there is no causal link between justifying the court’s soft separation of powers model, with what it’s actually doing. So, my point here really is that this whole justification of a strict separation of powers is not applying. That the understanding that the court can venture into judicial administration holds true only up to a point where the court is focused with the constituency, predominantly, that needs it the most. But I’m not sure if the same justification holds when you look at the empirical reality of the constituencies the court is actually working towards or giving more of its docket space to.

Saher Nitin Gole: You suggest that some regulatory disputes might be better handled by sectoral regulators or other institutional mechanisms rather than constitutional courts. But given the weaknesses that often exist within Indian regulatory institutions, is judicial intervention sometimes a necessary second-best solution?

Pranav Verma: Thank you for that question. See, one of the strongest arguments in favour of the activist role by courts that go to the second-best solution is actually just this, that, as I said, in developing societies, to borrow Professor Baxi’s words, which are plagued by administrative apathy and administrative malfeasance as he calls it, courts have to step in. What Justice Michael Kirby says in his Hamnyl lecture is fully cited in the Supreme Court’s Swaraj Abhiyan PIL judgment on drought relief as a justification for the role that the court is doing. Swaraj Abhiyan is the case where the court makes extensive directions to the government, to the ‘t’, to say that this is how you should allocate your budget. And the then Finance Minister says on the floor of the Parliament that brick by brick, the edifice of the legislature is being corroded by courts. So, in that judgment, this quote from Justice Kirby is reproduced, and I’ll just paraphrase it. What he says is that, so urgent and numerous are the needs of a society such as India, or in developing society in the same economic bracket, that anything other than judicial activism, would be seen by lawyers and judges included, as the abdication of the court’s essential constitutional rule. That’s the perspective that a constitutional court in Europe or in a western society may lack. But as I said, what is lost in the separation of powers debate is the question of whether the court is best equipped to grant long-term relief. It may be a second-best solution from a legitimacy standpoint. But is it competent and equipped to grant the relief that the executive may grant in the long run with considerably less roadblocks? I would agree with those such as Varun Gauri, that which institution is more equipped to grant relief better is also, to some extent, an empirical claim.

So, the question is: Does the court’s intervention prevent meaningful long-term legislature and executive driven reform? Does it contribute to executive inertia? When a court takes up a continuing mandamus for 30 years and 40 years and says we will govern this field, does it leave the executive agencies worse off? Is there an incentive for a government agency to develop its own capacity if the court doesn’t let go of a continuing mandamus for decades altogether? Now, we can’t answer these questions just argumentatively, which is why I said whether or not the executive might have been able to do a better job if the court had not intervened is an empirical claim. But let me go back to something that Varun Gauri says here, that whenever we make this criticism that the court has taken off a continuing mandamus for 30 years, like Godavarman, and where is the scope for the executive to really be able to deal with the situation on ground, we are really comparing apples and oranges. Because you’re comparing an ideal or a hypothetical legislative or an executive response with a very real judicial one, when the real judicial response has resulted because of the failings of the executive in the first place. So, there’s some merit in this view, but I think, again, in scholarship, there’s a tendency to answer the question you have posed in extremes. That the executive is better off or that the courts must intervene. But I don’t think it has to be the zero-sum game. The reality is more complicated. Courts are in PILs, often in dialogue with the executive. So, in several PILs, many a time the court is asking the executive, “What is possible for you to do here?” from a capacity standpoint and nudge them to do more. If the executive says we don’t have enough budgets, nudge resource allocation from the government. But seriously take their inputs while making interim orders. That means you’re setting up your interim orders for some hope of successful implementation. Because then you can’t say that there was no input or capacity consideration taken into account.

So, this dialogic approach towards passing a meaningful PIL order, I think, might be a more appropriate middle path. It will ensure, as I said, that considerations such as expertise, executive capability, and competence are all accounted for. And it still means that the court has a supervisory role. It can still push and nudge the executive to do more. It can take care of the ‘administrative will’ question. It is not altogether ignoring that some things might be better for the executive to do. But that dialogue ensures that someone is nudging the executive to do it even as their own views are being taken into account.

Shauryaveer Chaudhry: That seems to be an interesting solution, sir. Now, to move forward, a lot of this regulatory power in PILs, which operates through continuing mandamus and court-appointed committees and detailed directions to executive agencies. Do you think these developments are best understood as an expansion of Article 32, or have they effectively created a distinct form of constitutional jurisdiction that is difficult to fit within the traditional writ doctrine?

Pranav Verma: In many ways, that’s a conversation similar to PIL itself. We ask the same question, “Is a dilution of standing, expansion of remedies, evidence collection, can be justified within a traditional constitutional adjudication framework?” The answer to this question draws from the same considerations. Courts have had to devise remedies. If you ask any judge who has done PILs, they will say that they have had to do it because there’s unwillingness on the part of the executive to implement their decisions. So maybe it would be of interest to your listeners to go to the Oxford Human Rights website and see the interview between Sandra Fredman and Justice Muralidhar, and he had given the interview then as a sitting Delhi High Court judge. He defends the continuing mandamus, and essentially says, “I can give a very grand judgment on paper and conclude the proceedings. But if I’m true to myself, I would know that this is not going to be implemented overnight, unless the executive is pushed to implement it.” So, I think something is to be said about taking that experience of a judge into account, because this does mean resource allocation, but more importantly, it’s just a question of a will to do it. And the concern there really is that a litigant can leave a court thinking that they have won but be frustrated at the implementation stage. That’s very much also the explicit acknowledgement in Vineet Narain when the Supreme Court speaks of the continuing mandamus explicitly in one of its first instances. So that instinct reveals that there is a, if I use the opposite of an ‘administrative will’, an ‘administrative wont’. Or at least there’s a strong suspicion of it that drives a judge to go the continuing mandamus path.

Taking a systemic view, I’m giving these examples to draw out what the proposition in favour of the continuing mandamus is. But let me give you another example. On the other hand, let’s look at what remains after the recent closure of MC Mehta, our longest standing continuing mandamus, the TN Godavarman case. In 2016, Mr. Godavarman passes away and the court simply converts it into a suo motu case, changes the cause title to In re: TN Godavarman v Union of India, and continues hearing it. Now, Godavarman starts in 1995 with a petition to stop large-scale illegal timber logging and deforestation in the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. Right now, the Supreme Court does in the PIL what Anuj Bhuwania calls ‘Omnibus PILs’. It picks up a particular geographically focused complaint from a petition, turns it into a citywide or a nationwide issue to be resolved, and then keeps it on as a continuing mandamus. So, the court turns the Godavarman petition into a national forestation continuing mandamus for the entirety of the country. And it says that India should have a target of 33% of national forest and tree cover area as a percentage of the total geographical area. This 33% figure comes from the government’s own policies, the National Forest Policy of 1988. Now, for context here, when the case is gaining momentum, the Indian forest and tree cover is standing at 20-21% at the time. It’s been thirty-one years since Godavarman starts with the objective of increasing this cover to 33%. Latest figures are saying that the national tree and forest cover is at about 25%. So, in 31 years of a long running continuing mandamus where the court is taking matter in its own hands, you have seen a rise in the forest cover of just about 4-5%. And those figures can be deceiving because if there’s some part of the country with more forest area and then there’s a desert in Rajasthan, we are still counting it as the national cover. Now, this very starkly tells us the risks and the uncertainties of these long-standing continuing mandamuses. So clearly, just because there’s a continuing mandamus, I don’t think that by itself guarantees enforcement. There are important variables. One variable is, as I said, ‘administrative won’t’, but the other variable is that judges come and go across a 30-year life of a continuing mandamus. And different judges may bring their own intensity in how they’re pursuing that continuing mandamus. Intensity may rise and wane with who the judges are at a given point of time. This is also because PILs vest a lot of discretion with judges. This dilution of all adversarial procedure has also meant that what remains is just a room of judicial discretion. So, this then becomes a question of what are the focuses and priorities and predispositions that every judge might bring to their tenure when they are hearing a continuing mandamus.

To me, Godavarman really shows the pitfalls of both the ‘administrative won’t’ (the target comes from the government’s own policy of 33%), and the limits of judicial enforcement of standards as well. So, to certainly answer your question, it’s a novelty. In constitutional enforcement, it pushes the bounds of a traditional writ of mandamus. But again, to me, the question would be how far this premise of pushing boundaries is actually realized in practice. To that end, I don’t think having a continuing mandamus inevitably means that there’s going to be excellent enforcement. I think the jury is still out, particularly when you have such long-running continuing mandamus.

Devang Pandey: Thank you, Professor. For the next question, there seems to be an interesting tension between your account and Professor Upendra Baxi’s. Baxi deliberately used the term ‘Social Action Litigation’ because he thought the emerging Indian phenomenon was fundamentally different from the American PIL, which as he described as increasingly concerned with things like environmental and consumer interests, civic participation, than with state repression and rights of disadvantaged groups. Now, your data suggests that Indian PIL has itself moved substantially towards regulatory and environmental matters, while poor and disadvantaged groups now occupy only a small pocket of it. Now, do you think contemporary Indian PIL has in some sense become closer to the American model that Baxi was trying to distinguish it from, and therefore come to a full circle? If that is right, does it mean that Baxi’s distinction between PIL and SAL was ultimately a historically contingent one – or do you think there is still something conceptually distinctive about SAL that survives even after the constituency of Indian PIL has changed?

Pranav Verma: Thank you for that question. You know, Professor Baxi has been a teacher to us, has been a teacher to my teacher and to their teacher. He has a phenomenal presence in both the Indian legal landscape and PIL scholarship. A lot of this work is made possible by the writings of Professor Baxi from the late 1970s and 80s. So he certainly describes the label PIL as the American label and even chides those who continue to use PIL as “Americanized Indians”. That is because he says that in America, you have PILs which are concerned with questions of, as you said, civic participation in governmental decision making which are “interests without groups”. You’re talking of environmental matters and consumerism, which is exactly what the Indian Supreme Court has done with its own PILs.

I would add a caveat that, of course, Professor Baxi’s description of the American PIL experience is of the time when he’s writing in late 1970s and 80s which might not be reflective of the contemporary American PIL experience either. But the PIL movement in India starts with the rhetoric in both the judgments of the court and in the scholarly literature, that this is in the name of those who are at the margins of socioeconomic discrimination. Professor Baxi says that there is a more substantive side to it and he calls them ‘Social Action Litigations’ – there’s a more activist side to it.

Now, there’s one view that the label is descriptive. If you read Professor Baxi’s writing, it does appear to be descriptive. There’s another view, which Professor Arun in his writing says, that the label is an aspirational one – that this is what the court is guided to be doing. So, we can debate whether it’s descriptive or aspirational. But just 16 years after his major article on social action litigation, Professor Baxi himself says that PILs are now being used against the group they were meant to serve. He famously says now they have justice denying attributes to them. I have here a benefit of hindsight. So with that caveat, let me begin and say that we can safely detach ourselves from the SAL label if it was meant to be descriptive of PILs. We can hold on to it if it’s an aspirational label.

Either way, my argument in the paper is that if you take an empirically informed view of the court’s docket, you cannot reasonably come to a view that today PILs in India are about social action litigations. So perhaps the aspirational view has failed to materialize somewhere down the road. I mentioned early on in this conversation exactly this, that an empirically informed approach is needed to make systemic claims. Whether a PIL is a social action litigation is a systemic claim. These claims can be made by looking at one or two or three handful of cases. The danger of that is very clear because a lot of the writing that is celebrating PILs comes in the late 1970s and 1980s. An empirical outlook tells you that in its first decade itself of the PIL movement, the poor and disadvantaged groups were just at 27% on the docket. The court was already taking a regulatory turn in its first 10 years. But that reality of the first decade of PILs is not reflected in the writing that’s coming out in that decade because it’s not descriptive writing but based on a data set that’s not reasonably comprehensive. But 45 years on, to continue to call PILs a ‘Social Action Litigation’, in my view, risks legitimizing the court’s new fashion rule as a ‘super regulator’. So the SCI continues to add to this legitimation of PILs. As I said, post-Emergency, the court legitimizes PILs because it is in the name of the poor and disadvantaged.

If you continue calling it a Social Action Litigation, when what the court is actually doing is regulating and governing, you are really legitimizing the rule of regulation and governance in the Supreme Court. There’s something to be said about tempering the rhetorical justification of PILs in a way that it’s a more accurate reflection of what the court’s actually doing with PILs today.

Devang Pandey: Thank you, Professor. For the next question, your paper suggests that procedural innovations that originally made PIL accessible to disadvantaged groups, especially the relaxation of locals and adversarial procedure, eventually enabled judges to exercise much greater discretion. What are some safeguards that may be implemented at this juncture to return to the original motive of PILs rather than a form of decision making that, at times, does not even consider its impact on disadvantaged groups?

Pranav Verma: I don’t think there’s a need to reinvent the wheel here. It’s a conversation that’s been happening and safeguards have been spoken about before. Safeguards exist within the system. It’s not the case to be clear that there are no guidelines – the Supreme Court’s own Handbook of Office Procedure, published in 2017, is a compilation of detailed guidelines which are really internal facing: what are the factors that the courts registry has to consider when it’s treating a petition or a letter petition as a PIL? They restrict the acceptance of petitions as PILs to those that genuinely involve the poor and disadvantaged groups, those who carry with them a pathos of socioeconomic injustices. They also explicitly exclude private disputes, service matters, educational institution admission matters, etc.

You have some form of a safeguard in that sense. Yet what I found in my survey was that these guidelines are followed more in breach than in observance. It seems that within the registry of the court, there is perhaps not a very consistent application of the set of criteria that are outlined in advance. It’s not clear if the 2017 Handbook is really treated by the registry itself as a guiding document. But what really complicates matters is that this is also a question of case allocation. What I mean by that is that PIL is now a subject matter category in the Supreme Court’s judges roster which is often reserved by the Chief Justice as the Master of Roster for themselves, or at most shared with the next two or one senior most judges. There’s an interconnection of what PILs the court hears with what might be the Chief Justice’s power as Master of Roster, in what cases they are prioritizing to hear. So this Master of Roster power shapes generally courts listing priorities and specifically also where PILs are concerned.

Where is the focus of the court? Is it towards the regulatory turn? Is it towards issues of socioeconomic justice? It also means that each Chief Justice might bring to court for their very short tenures, their own listing priorities. Right now, every Chief Justice before they assume office, outline their agenda for the office that their focus may be to resolve pendency in constitutional matters or in specific areas, such as integration of AI. So the issue of listing priority of a Chief Justice will largely shape the court’s focus in PIL jurisdiction too.

We are speaking here of a very discretion-centric system where there’s little visibility to those outside the system on what those guiding criteria produce. What are those listing decisions as far as PILs are concerned? What I’m able to gather is that the court’s own criteria from the handbook are not being followed. It’s difficult to speak of streamlining the PIL acceptance criteria. It’s difficult to think of safeguards without a concomitant streamlining of the listing discretion of the Chief Justice, because I think these two are at the end of the day, very interconnected matters. Of course, none of this can emerge from outside the court – the legislature or the executive can’t work towards PIL reform, there will be questions of undermining judicial independence. That reform has to come from within. But I suppose with how short the tenures of Chief Justices are, not many have had the luxury to take a systemic view of the institution and implement it. I think that holds true for the court’s PIL focus as well.

Saher Nitin Gole: Thank you for the answer, Professor. We know that PILs emerged in a particular historical context, what you described as the “post-emergency catharsis” of the Supreme Court, as a sort of redemptive exercise to regain legitimacy. You also note how Professor Upendra Baxi had cautioned that the promises of this endeavor might be too grandiose to fulfill. So, after 45 years, do you think the eventual marginalization of its intended beneficiaries reflects a loss of newfound enthusiasm on the part of the Supreme Court, a loss of faith on behalf of the disadvantaged petitioners, or something else entirely?

Pranav Verma: It’s a difficult question to answer. See, if loss of faith is people approaching the court through PILs, then the story is very different. As I show in the paper, an overwhelming majority of PILs and the way in which PILs are instituted are through letter petitions and only about 1% of those petitions get converted into PILs. So there’s clearly some rigorous screening that is being done. Whatever the paper presents as the court’s regulatory turn is after that rigorous screening – so that’s some perspective to keep in mind.

People continuing to go to the court, bringing regulatory matters to the court’s doorstep, matters that are not always about socioeconomic injustices, is a reality. Because after all, the court is able to have a regulatory turn because those cases come in the pipeline and people are bringing those cases to the court instead of taking them to the government. So that could indeed be a function of some disenchantment with the executive or the government agencies in question. One side of the story might be that the court is performing an increasingly regulatory function because people think it is an institution which can be trusted to do so, which may have some legitimacy – why else are these cases landing up before the Supreme Court, you might ask. Whether that is because of more faith in the court or less faith in the executive is again an argumentative question.

You can’t answer it unless, let’s say, you have access to all petitions that come to court and not just the one percent that I had access to, which are looking at the judgments. You need to really look at what kinds of cases are even being filed in the court, but there’s no visibility on that data. But that could really tell us who continues to come to court, which would answer the legitimacy question in some sense. But what we can safely conclude nonetheless is at least the survey of reported judgments is illuminating about the court’s own focus. Because if it’s a question of a listing priority, the court chooses whether that priority goes to cases of socioeconomic disadvantage more, or does that priority get displaced in favor of regulatory matters more?

It is fair to say that the court has made some conscious choices in what that focus looks like notwithstanding whatever is happening at the previous pre-screening stage. We know already it is enough scholarship to suggest that the Supreme Court of India functions more as an appellate court than as a constitutional court. That’s again a question of the fact that 90% of cases filed in the court are SLPs in its docket. So perhaps the PIL picture adds to the story; that what really relegates its constitutional function to the margins is that the court increasingly performs the role of an appellate court and a court that governs and regulates executive agencies. The cumulative result is perhaps we don’t have a predominantly constitutional court anymore.

About the question of legitimacy, I think that the rhetoric of legitimacy is the same in 2026 as it was in the late 1970s, that this is in the name of the poor and disadvantaged. Even till date, judges who have extensively dealt with PILs will bring this aspect up in their public speeches or as Chief Justices when they assume office – that we will continue to be a court of last resort for the last man in the line. I guess my endeavor is to just say that there are good reasons to carefully scrutinize that practice and narrative because that rhetoric is what is really sustaining this legitimacy. If you pierce through that veil and look at what the court’s docket actually is, we have some tougher questions to answer.

Shauryaveer Chaudhry: Thank you so much. That was the last question for today. I’m sure our audience would really benefit from the discussion we’ve had today and that they’ll also learn a lot such as did we, especially after studying PILs and constitutional law in our university courses. I felt that having this discussion did enrich my understanding of this topic and I’m sure I’m speaking on behalf of Devang and Saher when I say this. Thank you for joining us today, Professor.

Pranav Verma: Thank you.