Judiciary

This is Chapter 4 of NCERT's Class 8 Social and Political Life – III (2024–25 reprint), the only chapter of Unit Three. The PDF has 14 pages: a unit opener with a photograph (book p. 46), a Teacher's Note (p. 47), then the chapter (pp. 48–59), with no page offset. The book's five ideas, as its Teacher's Note lists them: the role of the judiciary, its independence, the structure of courts (taught through a real case), the branches of the legal system, and access to justice (PIL and delay). We use seven concept sections — the structure idea is split into the court pyramid and the appeal ladder, and delay gets its own section because the book's judges table needs one. Every number is recomputed in the file; anything beyond the book is marked †. No map is drawn. The chapter cites no Indian knowledge tradition; we add none.

• How this chapter relates to UPSC, honestly: Polity is heavily tested in Prelims and GS2, and the judiciary is one of its most-asked areas — judicial review, independence, appointments, PIL, Article 21, pendency. This chapter gives the why (rule of law, independence, access to justice) and two real cases; the exact law — Articles 124–147 and 214–231, jurisdiction, the collegium — is in the senior chapters.
• Senior chapters: keps206 (Judiciary — independence, appointment and removal, jurisdiction, judicial activism, judicial review; the main senior read); keps202 (Rights in the Indian Constitution — Article 32, writs, Article 21); keps201 (Constitution: Why and How — the rule of law and limits on power); lesy203 (The Constitution and Social Change — law as a tool of social justice). Class 9 iest106 (Democracy — rule of law, separation of powers); Class 10 jess401 (Power-sharing — checks and balances).
• Before and after in this book: hess301 (The Indian Constitution — Fundamental Rights, separation of powers), hess302 (Understanding Secularism) and hess303 (Parliament — the domestic-violence law, a civil law, and the courts' power to cancel unconstitutional laws) come first; hess306 (Confronting Marginalisation) and hess308 (Law and Social Justice) use courts and rights again.
• UPSC from this chapter: eight questions — Prelims 1992 (judiciary statements), 2017 (what judicial review implies), 2018 (features of the rule of law), 2020 (basic structure and judicial review); Mains GS2 2020 (PILs seeking guidelines), 2023 (judicial independence and democracy), 2023 (the widening right to life) and 2024 (growth of PIL). List and keys at the end.

• Rule of law: laws apply equally to all, with fixed procedures when a law is violated; the judiciary enforces it.
• Three kinds of work: dispute resolution; judicial review (striking down laws that violate the Constitution); enforcing Fundamental Rights (Supreme Court or High Court).
• Independence: separation of powers; appointment with very little interference from the other branches; very difficult removal. Collegium vs NJAC (struck down 16 Oct 2015 †) as positions.
• Structure: subordinate/district courts → 25 High Courts (first in 1862) → Supreme Court (inaugurated 28 Jan 1950 †). Integrated: higher decisions bind lower; the appellate system — the Sudha Goel case (Trial: convicted → HC: acquitted → SC 1985: two guilty, life imprisonment).
• Criminal vs civil: offence → FIR → police → trial → jail/fine; harm to rights → petition by the affected party → specific relief.
• Access: PIL (letter or telegram can do); Right to Food (PUCL, 2001) → mid-day meals; Olga Tellis (1985): livelihood part of life. Delay: judges' posts vacant (book: HCs 333 of 1,108, 30.1%); Hashimpura case took over 31 years.

A newspaper shows how wide the courts' work is. India has the rule of law: laws apply equally to all persons, and a fixed set of procedures must be followed when a law is violated. To enforce it there is a judicial system — courts a citizen can approach when a law is broken. As an organ of government, the judiciary plays a crucial role in India's democracy, and it can do so only because it is independent. Courts decide a very wide range of issues — that no teacher may beat a student, how river waters are shared between States, how people are punished for crimes. The book groups their work under three heads. Dispute resolution: between citizens, between citizens and the government, between two State governments, and between the Centre and the States. Judicial review: as the final interpreter of the Constitution, the judiciary can strike down laws passed by Parliament that it finds in violation of the Constitution (the book says ‘of the basic structure’ — see the trap below). Upholding the law and enforcing Fundamental Rights: every citizen can approach the Supreme Court or a High Court if they believe their Fundamental Rights have been violated.

The book asks you to imagine a powerful politician who has taken land belonging to your family, in a system where the politician can appoint and dismiss the judge. The judge, controlled by him, cannot decide independently and would rule in his favour. Though rich and powerful people in India are often heard trying to influence the judicial process, the Constitution guards against this by providing for the independence of the judiciary. One part of it is the separation of powers (Chapter 1): the legislature and executive cannot interfere in the judiciary's work; the courts are not under the government and do not act for it. For this to work, judges of the High Courts and the Supreme Court must be appointed with very little interference from the other branches, and once appointed, a judge is very difficult to remove. Independence lets the courts ensure there is no misuse of power by the legislature and executive, and protect citizens' Fundamental Rights, because anyone can approach the courts if their rights are violated.

There are three levels of courts: several at the lower level and only one at the apex. The courts most people deal with are the subordinate or district courts, usually at the district or Tehsil level or in towns, hearing many kinds of cases; each State is divided into districts presided over by a District Judge. Each State has a High Court, its highest court. At the top is the Supreme Court in New Delhi, presided over by the Chief Justice of India; its decisions are binding on all other courts. A side box adds: High Courts were first set up in the three Presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1862; the Delhi High Court came in 1966; there are 25 High Courts today; Punjab and Haryana share one at Chandigarh, and Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh share one at Guwahati; Andhra Pradesh (Amaravati) and Telangana (Hyderabad) have had separate High Courts since 1 January 2019; some High Courts have benches elsewhere in the State for easier access. The subordinate court goes by many names — Trial Court, Court of the District Judge, Additional Sessions Judge, Chief Judicial Magistrate, Metropolitan Magistrate, Civil Judge.

The levels are connected: India has an integrated judicial system, in which decisions of higher courts bind lower courts. Another way to see the integration is the appellate system: a person may appeal to a higher court if they believe a lower court's judgment is not just. The book tracks State (Delhi Administration) vs Laxman Kumar and Others (1985). In February 1980 Laxman Kumar married 20-year-old Sudha Goel; they lived in a Delhi flat with Laxman's brothers and their families. On 2 December 1980 Sudha died in hospital of burns, and her family filed a case. In the Trial Court, four neighbours testified that on the night of 1 December they heard her scream, forced their way in, found her sari in flames and put out the fire; Sudha told them her mother-in-law Shakuntala had poured kerosene on her and her husband had lit it. Her family and a neighbour said her in-laws had tortured her and demanded more cash, a scooter and a fridge on the birth of the first child. The defence said her sari caught fire accidentally while heating milk. The Trial Court convicted Laxman, Shakuntala and the brother-in-law Subash Chandra and sentenced all three to death. In November 1983 the three appealed to the High Court, which held that the death was an accidental fire from the kerosene stove and acquitted all three. Women's groups, which through the 1980s had protested courts' failure to bring ‘dowry deaths’ to justice, demonstrated, and a separate appeal was filed in the Supreme Court through the Indian Federation of Women Lawyers. In 1985 the Supreme Court reached a different decision: Laxman and his mother guilty, the brother-in-law acquitted for lack of evidence, and the two sentenced to life imprisonment.

The Sudha Goel dowry death is a ‘crime against society’ — a violation of criminal law. The legal system also deals with civil law; the book recalls the civil law of 2005–06 that protects women against domestic violence (hess303). The book's table sets out three differences. What it deals with: criminal law covers conduct the law defines as offences — theft, harassing a woman to bring more dowry, murder; civil law covers harm or injury to the rights of individuals — disputes over the sale of land, purchase of goods, rent, divorce. How it begins: a criminal case usually begins with an FIR lodged with the police, who investigate, after which a case is filed in court; in a civil case a petition is filed in the relevant court by the affected party only — in a rent matter, either the landlord or the tenant. What follows: in a criminal case the accused, if found guilty, can be sent to jail and also fined; in a civil case the court gives the specific relief asked for — for example, ordering a flat to be vacated and pending rent paid.

In principle every citizen can approach the courts, so every citizen has a right to justice through them; the courts protect Fundamental Rights. In reality, access has always been difficult for most of the poor: legal procedures cost a lot of money, need much paperwork and take time; for a person who cannot read and whose family depends on a daily wage, going to court seems remote. In response, the Supreme Court in the early 1980s devised Public Interest Litigation (PIL): any individual or organisation could file a PIL in a High Court or the Supreme Court on behalf of those whose rights were being violated. The process was simplified — even a letter or telegram to the Court could be treated as a PIL. Early PILs rescued bonded labourers from inhuman conditions and secured the release of prisoners in Bihar kept in jail after their sentences were over. The book's photo essay explains how mid-day meals came about: in 2001, drought in Rajasthan and Orissa caused acute food shortage while government godowns were full of grain, some eaten by rats. In this ‘hunger amidst plenty’, the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) filed a PIL arguing that the Right to Life in Article 21 includes the Right to Food; the State's plea of inadequate funds failed because the godowns were overflowing. The Court held the State had a duty to provide food to all, and directed it to provide more employment, cheaper food through ration shops and mid-day meals for children, appointing two Food Commissioners to report on implementation. For the common person, access to courts is access to justice. Courts also read the Right to Livelihood into the Right to Life in Olga Tellis vs Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985): ‘life’ means more than mere animal existence; no one can live without the means of living; pavement and slum dwellers live near their small jobs, so evicting them would take away their livelihood and so their life. But the book notes that activists working on the right to shelter believe recent judgments on evictions are a far cry from earlier ones: recent judgments tend to see the slum dweller as an encroacher, while earlier ones like Olga Tellis tried to protect livelihoods.

Another barrier is the very long time courts take to hear a case — summed up in the phrase ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. The book's table ‘Number of Judges in India’ gives sanctioned strength, working strength and vacancies: Supreme Court 34, 34, 0; High Courts 1,108, 775, 333; District and Subordinate Courts 25,042, 19,192, 5,850 (rows A and B dated 19 December 2022). Recomputed: every row adds up; in all, 26,184 posts, 20,001 judges working and 6,183 vacant (23.6%); the High Courts had 30.1% of posts vacant and the district courts 23.4%. A photograph shows family members of some of those killed at Hashimpura, Meerut, on 22 May 1987 (the book's caption says 43 Muslims); their fight for justice lasted over 31 years. Because the trial was long delayed in starting, the Supreme Court transferred the case from Uttar Pradesh to Delhi in September 2002; 19 Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) men were prosecuted for alleged murder and other offences; by 2007 only three prosecution witnesses had been examined; the Delhi High Court convicted the accused on 31 October 2018. Yet, the book concludes, the judiciary has played a crucial role in democratic India — a check on the executive and legislature and a protector of Fundamental Rights — as the Constituent Assembly envisaged.

Every margin question, table and activity, in page order.

Nine exercises. Try first, then open.

Numbers

One-liners

• The rule of law: the same law for everyone, applied by fixed procedure.
• Courts resolve disputes, review laws and enforce Fundamental Rights.
• A judge whom one side can hire or fire cannot judge fairly.
• One Supreme Court, 25 High Courts, many subordinate courts — one integrated system.
• Higher courts' decisions bind lower ones; appeals go upwards.
• Criminal law punishes offences; civil law gives relief for harm to rights.
• PIL let anyone approach the court for those who could not.
• Courts read food and livelihood into the Right to Life.
• Justice delayed is justice denied.

Traps to avoid

• The Supreme Court was inaugurated on 28 January 1950 (the Constitution began on 26 January).
• Judicial review covers laws and executive orders that violate the Constitution; the basic-structure test is for amendments, and the Constitution does not define the basic structure.
• Courts judge constitutionality, not the wisdom of a law.
• High Court judges are appointed by the President; district judges by the Governor in consultation with the High Court.
• There are 25 High Courts but 28 States: some share (Goa with Bombay; four NE States at Guwahati; Punjab and Haryana).
• After a Supreme Court verdict there is no going back to the Trial Court — only review or curative petitions in the same Court.
• The FIR is now under s. 173 BNSS (from 1 July 2024), not s. 154 CrPC.
• Mid-day meals existed from 1995; the 2001 PUCL order made cooked meals an entitlement.
• Olga Tellis recognised livelihood as part of life but allowed eviction by fair procedure.
• The book's Supreme Court row (34 working, Dec 2022) is out of date for its own date — the Court reached 34 in Feb 2023.
• The domestic-violence law is of 2005 (in force 2006), in Chapter 3 of this reprint, not Chapter 4.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• From this chapter: the rule of law's features (2018); what judicial review means (2017) and that the basic structure is not defined in the Constitution (2020); statements on the judiciary's independence and hierarchy (1992). Learn the three kinds of judicial work, the pyramid and the safeguards as bare facts.
• Elsewhere: appointment, removal, salaries and retired judges (1985–2021), original and advisory jurisdiction (1996, 2001, 2014), district judges (1996, 2004), PIL's origins and people (1997, 2006, 2008), Lok Adalats and NALSA (2005–2020) and the 99th Amendment (2019) sit on keps206; Fundamental Rights and writs on keps202.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• From this chapter: GS2 2023 (judicial independence as a prerequisite of democracy) — use the book's thought experiment and the safeguards chart; GS2 2024 (growth of PIL) and GS2 2020 (PILs seeking guidelines and the separation of powers) — the Right to Food story and the PIL positions table; GS2 2023 (the widening right to life) — the Article 21 hub (Olga Tellis, PUCL).
• Elsewhere: the NJAC judgment (2017), collegium vs USA (2025), women in the higher judiciary (2021), judicial activism and the basic structure (2014), Coelho (2016), legal aid (2023) and Lok Adalats (2024) are on keps206.
• Keep answers neutral: judgments as dated facts; collegium, PIL, evictions and delays as attributed positions; no evaluation of any judge, judgment or government.

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