Writ Petitions (including Public Interest Litigation) have captured public imagination and are a kind of court case which doesn’t deal with general law and order or civil disputes between private parties. Any time that a citizen’s rights (including fundamental rights) are violated, Article 226 of the Constitution of India empowers them to approach the relevant High Court for restoration of the right in question. The aggrieved party petitions the court to issue formal, ‘written’ orders or directions to a specific government authority for relief. Such cases help reveal how citizens interact with the judiciary as an independent pillar of the state and place their faith in courts to take action against executive overreach, impropriety or lack of action.

In this Dashboard, the first tab explores data as reported by High Courts to the Supreme Court. This tab provides wider context on the scope of writ cases within the judicial system.
The next three tabs use the DAKSH writ dataset to further explore subject matter, time taken and case outcomes. The complete raw dataset may be accessed under the Resources tab

Preferred citation: DAKSH India (2022). DAKSH High Court Database: Writ Case dataset (v2).[url]