New Delhi, Dec 5 (IANS) The Supreme Court Monday said it was not for the courts to involve themselves in issues of policy which comes under the domain of the government and parliament.
‘As as far as public safety is concerned, Article 21 of the Constitution is there. For all other issues, they may not be for the court of law to decide. They may be the issues of policy,’ said an apex court bench of Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia, Justice A.K. Patnaik and Justice Swatanter Kumar.
While adjourning the matter for four weeks, the court said: ‘Supreme Court will remain the Supreme Court. Supreme Court is not a parliament.’
The court made the observation while hearing a petition by NGO Common Cause, which sought directions for setting up an independent nuclear regulatory authority and questioned import of nuclear power plants with what it called doubtful technological safety.
‘You say that we are sitting on a time bomb. Please show what are the solutions,’ Chief Justice Kapadia told counsel Prashant Bhushan when he pitched for a regulatory authority which was independent of the government’s control.
‘We are of the view that you can have a debate and come out with a suggestion to address the issue, and the same could be considered till parliament makes a statute contemplated by the government,’ the court told Bhushan.
‘We are not saying that this matter is not important. It concerns right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. You tell us what needs to be done,’ the court told Bhushan when he said the regulatory authority the centre was seeking to put in place would not be free from government control and pressures.
The court asked him to produce before it the models of the independent regulatory authorities functioning in the US, Canada, the UK and France.
As counsel for NGO Common Cause, Bhushan argued for setting up a regulatory authority independent of government control. The court said, ‘You can’t say that it will be totally independent. There will be no government scientist (on it).’
It further said that ‘in India all scientists are government employees’ and added that ‘you (petitioner) can’t say that scientists (in government employment) will not act independently.’
Clarifying his position vis-a-vis the scientists who will man the independent regulatory mechanism, Bhushan said they could even be those who had earlier worked under the Department of Atomic Energy and had retired.
On other prayers of the petition, Bhushan told the court that the government should be asked what it had done to address 95 top priority concerns in the existing nuclear power plants that came to light in the course of a review.
Counsel told the court that the Tarapore nuclear plant had become obsolete and now ‘we are buying outdated and defective nuclear plants’ about which European and American regulators expressed reservations.
