Prima facie case disclosed, granting leave to institute the suit without serving the notice required under Sub-section (1) of Section 80 of the CPC.

( 1 ) THIS suit concerns the National Police Memorial located in a large public park at the Teen Murti End of Shantipath in an area that has come to be commonly known as the Diplomatic Enclave of New Delhi. Most of the embassies are located on either side of this road. The entire area is remarkable not only because of the foreign missions but also because of its vast and open expanses of greenery. It may well be an ideal location for a national memorial provided it gells and not jars, merges and does not mar with its environs. There is a perception that our police force is greatly ignored when compared to the armed forces, in terms of their respective working and living conditions. Police officers have to work long and unregulated hours, and their housing is dismal when compared with other Government servants. With the egregious escalation in terrorist activities within our country, the casualties in the police and armed forces are largely comparable. Therefore, none can legitimately oppose the recognition of the invaluable services of the police to the country. However, the building of a national memorial for police personnel killed in the line of duty could be viewed as a cosmetic recognition of their services, unless and until it is combined with a concerted effort to improve their lot. I do not see the present legal action as an onslaught upon the decision to establish a police memorial, and neither the pleadings nor the arguments of the plaintiffs can be perceived as such. The Plaintiffs may be seen to have no personal interest in the outcome of the suit, if national or societal interests are considered to be altogether different to this controversy; one can only hope that in the very near future all these interests would be seen as coalescing with each other. The litigation should not be addressed as adversarial, as learned Senior counsel for the Plaintiffs has been at pains to repeat. The plaint has received the support of very high dignatories, retired senior bureaucrats, artists, architects, engineers and citizens. It was therefore to be expected that the respondent s may have thought it expedient to reappraise the nature of the memorial, even if not its location.

( 2 ) I shall immediately deal with the technical objections raised by the respondents firstly to the effect that the plaint must be rejected as the Plaintiffs have failed to disclose particulars of the civil rights of the plaintiffs which have been violated by the Respondents. Learned Counsel for the contesting defendants had approbated and reprobated on whether the Plaintiffs should be taken as busy-bodies, since some of them were participants in the decision making process itself. It had also been contended that the Plaintiffs are giving vent to their spleens; and their egos have been ruffled, for the reason that their opinions have not been accepted and implemented. Is it essential that the plaint must disclose a violation of the personal civil rights of the Plaintiffs, as Counsel for the Defendant s contend? I find no reason or requirement to locate any watershed between a civil suit and a writ petition, and to favour the opinion that the Court can consider public issues in the latter domain only. A quarter century ago Justice Krishna Iyer had envisioned the harbinger of what has now become an integral part of judicial process, namely, Public Interest Litigation (PIL ). The following extract from Maharaj Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh and others, (1977) 1 SCC 155 is worthy of reproduction. It galvanizes me into adopting this approach and arriving at the prima facie view that the plaintiffs adequately and sufficiently possess locus standi even in this civil suit, in contradistinction to a civil writ. 19. Aside from this stand, it is easy to take the view that the first plaintiff is a person aggrieved and has the competence to carry an appeal against the dismissal of the suit. Of course, he who has a proprietary right, which has been