Chennai: Madras high court has dismissed a public interest litigation seeking directions to Union and Tamil Nadu govts to enact a comprehensive “Road Safety Act”, holding that courts cannot compel legislatures to pass a particular law.Besides the main prayer, the petitioner had sought 18 other directions on a wide range of issues, including footpaths, parking regulations, stray dogs, bus bays, autorickshaw fares and the establishment of a university for road safety engineering.The first bench of Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G Arul Murugan passed the order on Friday while hearing a plea filed by Salem resident R Thambaiyah alias Seetharaman.“There can be no doubt that the petitioner’s concern is genuine. Road accidents claim an enormous number of lives in this country every year, and the petitioner, through his own organisation named as Tamil Saalai Panpattu Kazhagam, appears to have spent years trying to raise awareness about this problem. However, the sole intention, by itself, is not enough to allow this petition to proceed to a hearing on merits,” the court said.“Courts interpret and enforce laws once they exist; they examine whether an existing law or an executive action is constitutional; and in appropriate cases they can even fill a gap by laying down guidelines until Parliament or a State Legislature steps in, as the Supreme Court did, for instance, in matters such as sexual harassment at the workplace, before a statute was eventually passed,” the court said.“What a court cannot do is instruct the legislature that it must pass a particular law, on a particular subject, containing particular provisions,” the judges added.The court, however, granted the petitioner liberty to raise specific grievances—such as the absence of a footpath on an identified road, an unauthorised structure or an authority’s failure to act on a complaint—through separate petitions after paying the requisite court fee.
