The court affirmed that entitlement to relocation benefits under the policy should validly consider prior residency of slum dwellers, even if the current jhuggi was established post cut-off date.

JUDGMENT

1. The homeless, who people the pavements, the footpaths, and those inaccessible nooks and crannies of the city from where the teeming multitude prefer to avert their eyes, live on the fringes of existence. Indeed, they do not live, but merely exist; for life, with its myriad complexions and contours, envisaged by Article 21 of our Constitution, is unknown to them. Even a bare attempt at imagining how they live is, for us, peering out from our gilt-edged cocoons, cathartic. And so we prefer not to do so; as a result, these denizens of the dark continue to eke out their existence, not day by day, but often hour by hour, if not minute by minute.

2. Articles 38¹ and 39² of the Constitution of India obligate the State to secure a social order in which the sacred preambular goal of justice, social, economic and political, informs all institutions of national life and, towards this end, to strive to minimise inequalities in income, and to endeavour to eliminate inequalities and status, facilities and opportunities. In particular, Article 39 requires the State to direct its policy towards securing (i) that citizens have the right to an adequate means to livelihood (vide clause (a)), (ii) that ownership and control of material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good (vide clause (b)) and (iii) that the operation of the economic system does not result in concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment (vide clause (c)). Alleviation of the plight of the poor and homeless is subsumed in each of these directive principles which, though they are not enforceable by Court, are nonetheless fundamental in the governance of the country, and mandatorily required to be borne in mind by the State while making laws (vide Article 37³ ). One may legitimately extrapolate the mandate of Article 37 to requiring the State to bear, in mind, the directive principles not only while making laws, but also while implementing laws.⁴ Every statutory instrument, be it plenary or subordinate, is required to be so interpreted as to render it constitutional, rather than unconstitutional.⁵ Juxtaposed, these principles require all statutes, and instruments of state policy, to be interpreted in a manner which would harmonize with the directive principles of state policy, contained in Chapter IIIA of the Constitution of India.

3. When the poor and deprived knock at the doors of the Court, the Court is required to be sensitive and sensitised in equal measure. The Court is required to remain alive to the fact that such litigants do not have access to exhaustive legal resources. The onus that the law places on the petitioner who petitions the Court, to positively establish every ingredient necessary to entitle him to relief has, in the case of the impecunious with meagre resources at hand, to be tempered with the conviction that, if the litigant is entitled to relief, relief should not be denied to him on technical considerations. As one of the three co-equal wings of the government, albeit functioning independent of, and uninfluenced by, the other two, the judiciary is required to remain as sensitive to the call of Articles 38 and 39 as the legislature, or the executive. Law, with all its legalese, is worth tinsel, if the underprivileged cannot get justice. At the end of the day, our preambular goal is not law, but justice. Law is but the instrument, the via media, as it were, to attain the ultimate goal of justice, and law which cannot aspire to justice is, therefore, not worth administering.

Facts

4. The petitioners are five in number. Be it noted, at the very outset, that the petition has not been filed in a representative capacity, and that the relief sought in the petition is restricted to the five petitioners before the Court. For no fault of the petitioners, this petition has lingered in this Court for 13 years since it was filed. Issuance of omnibus directions, at this distance