CHANDIGARH; Even as the nationwide clamor for cheaper justice and free legal aid grows ever more strident, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has dramatically hiked the cost of litigation in the High Court.
Writ petitions filed in the high court will now attract a levy of Rs SO per person as court fee, instead of the earlier lump sum of Rs 50 for a single petition irrespective of the number of persons who have moved the petition. In other words, if 20 persons jointly institute a writ petition, they will have to pay an aggregate amount of Rs 1,000as court fee and not a mere Rs 50 as had always been the practice in the high court earlier.
This follows a direction given to the High Court Registry by a Division Bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, comprising the Chief Justice, Justice Rama Jois, and Justice Jawahar Lal Gupta, in a Judgement recently handed down by them.
The Judgement was delivered on June 2 but became public knowledge only recently when it was circulated by the registry to members of the high court bar along with the cause list upon the reopening of the court after the summer vacation,
According to the Judgement, “whenever individual relief, interim or final, is sought by more than one person, the office should treat It has many writ petitions as” there are petitioners,” “Each of them,” says the Judgement, “has to pay the court fee payable on a writ petition.”
The case before the division bench had been filed jointly by 49 persons, all working as accountants in the Punjab State Electricity Board. Inconformity with past practice, they had affixed court fee worth Rs 50 only on the writ petition. The bench directed them to pay the deficit court fee of Rs 2,400 and admitted the petition “subject to the payment of court fee,”
The only exception made by the court, where a single set of court fees would be sufficient, is where “the constitutional validity of a rule or provision of law is challenged and no specific individual interim relief is sought for,”
The Judgement, however, hastens to clarify that the exception does not extend to cases involving “common questions of fact and law” if the relief sought for is individual to each petitioner. In such cases as well the court fees would be calculated and levied per person.
It is significant that the Judgement has been rendered in a case where the petitioners Claimed the relief of “equal pay for equal work.” Ever since 1982, when the Supreme Court in Randhir Singhs case first established the Principle of equal pay for equal work as part of the Fun darn Right to Equality, thousand writ petitions in vok in principle are filed eye before different high: court the country.
These are generally group cases and the number of petitioners teaming up in a single petition on often runs in to hundreds.
Article extracted from this publication >> Aug 7, 1992
