HC ticks off petitioner for PIL based on newspaper reports

Chief Justice Mohit Shah and Justice B P Colabawalla asked lawyer Pradeep Havnur, appearing for petitioner Datta Mane, if his client had visited public hospitals and seen the state of affairs.

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“Have you visited any public hospital? Seen how things are? Only reading newspapers and filing a PIL is what we call ‘armchair’ philosopy,” remarked the court.

Going by the situation, the court said, “At the same time, we want the doctors to go to the hospitals and not come to court. Question is whether court should take over the monitoring.”

While Havnur argued that the government was ambiguous when it came to tackling swine flu cases, the state government lawyer contested, saying that the prayers in the petition sought statistics on swine flu case”.

“They could have filed an RTI and got the statistics,” said the government lawyer, to which Havnur said, “Numbers (swine flu cases) will only increase if I apply forRTI.”

Havnur informed the court that with rising numbers of H1N1 cases, the onus lay on the government to curb the spread of the disease.
Relying on a newspaper article published last month, Havnur said that in Maharashtra, there are 1,055 patients undergoing treatment and total deaths stood at 103 patients. “In Mumbai, there are 310 cases of Swine Flu (H1N1) and one person has died,” the petition said.

The petition has relied on around seven news stories on swine flu published in various news dailies. The petition also cites a March 1 news story, which said that there were 19 deaths in the state over 24 hours, which included Mumbai. The petition quoted the same article, which said that there were 42 new cases in Mumbai and 139 cases in the state by March 7.

“If the respondents are not directed to establish atleast one laboratory in each district, then there is serious apprehension that the patients of H1N1 would be rising due to delayed testing of samples of blood and number of innocent persons will be forced to lose their lives,” the petition said.

The court has granted four weeks’ time to the government lawyer to file his say.

aamir.khan@expressindia.com