ABSTRACT
An important function of courts in India relates to ‘judicial review’. The Constitution empowers the judiciary – Supreme Court in New Delhi and High Courts and other lower courts in each state – to protect the fundamental human rights of citizens and intervene when legislative and executive actions are found to be unconstitutional. In the past couple of decades, judicial activism has increased following the decision of the Supreme Court to accept ‘public interest litigation’ (PIL) that address ‘matters in which interest of the public at large is involved’. Such PIL petitions ‘can be moved by any individual or group of persons . . . highlighting the question of public importance for invoking this jurisdiction’.1 Similar forms of petitions relating to damage or threat of damage to the public interest are also accepted as ‘writ petition’ by lower level courts throughout the country. Since the 1980s, the judiciary has repeatedly intervened on matters related to starvation deaths and the human right to food. Parallel to such interventions has been the role of institutions like the National Human Rights Commission which has not only investigated cases of alleged starvation deaths in various parts of the country but has also directed sharp criticism at the efforts of central and state governments to promote development in some of the poorest regions of the country. Media coverage of acute poverty and deprivation in Kalahandi increased radically following Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to the district in 1985. Several concerned individuals and organisations sought the help of the judiciary to pressurise the Orissa government into action. Alleging starvation deaths and the general neglect of the district by the authorities, several petitions were filed in the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Orissa. These petitions and the subsequent judicial interventions in the late 1980s and early 1990s further increased national interest in the Kalahandi story. The focus of this chapter is therefore first on these legal interventions and thereafter on the impact they had on administrative understanding of, and response to, starvation in Kalahandi.
