bonded labor and criminal justice, two of the concerns crucial in the early justifications for PIL.

Have increasing numbers of cases involved middle class concerns? It is difficult to say for PILs more generally because an identifiable record of PIL cases is not available. To address this question, the paper used the set of Fundamental Rights cases described above. Fundamental Rights cases, at least those related to women and children’s rights and SC/ST/OBC concerns, may in fact underestimate the orientation of PILs to the middle classes because they exclude issues like urban quality of life that have been the concern of recent prominent litigation.

Figure 2 shows the number of cases in categories related women and children’s rights or to SC/ST/OBC issues, or which the SC explicitly called a PIL, as reported in Manupatra, in which the claimant was likely to have been, on the basis of a review of the written opinion, a member of the “advantaged classes.” For purposes of the coding, a member of the advantaged classes included a professional (doctors, teachers, members of the armed services, etc), a landowner or business person, or someone otherwise in the global middle class (including formal sector workers and civil service employees not designated as workers or laborers). Those not in the advantaged classes included those belonging to a scheduled caste or scheduled tribe or a member of the other backward classes (unless otherwise designated a member of an advantaged class), peasants, laborers, and those detained in the criminal justice system. Where groups or publicly minded individuals made claims in courts, and where there was no obvious plaintiff, the coders attempted to identify the general social class of the individuals whose interests were being advocated or defended. In 48 of the 310 cases in the sample (some 23%), the social class of the claimant(s) could not be discerned from the written opinion; or, and this was the more frequent problem, the social class was diffuse. Examples of this included cases concerning environmental protection of rivers and forest, challenges to the constitutionality of judicial action, and challenges to the statutory definition of rape. For these cases, the calculations and figures below considered the observation to have a missing value for social class. For every case, an effort was made to identify the individual or class of individuals on whose behalf the case was instituted – in some instances the lawyer or some other publicly minded individual is listed as the plaintiff/complainant in official records, but the claimant was coded was the person or class of persons whose interests the case was seeking to advance (e.g., child bonded laborers).

Figure 2 plots the number of cases involving Fundamental Rights in the categories described above, and the number of cases in which the claimant was a member of the advantaged classes. Simple OLS estimates are used to identify trend lines, which are inserted in the figure. The trend lines show that the number of claimants from advantaged classes has increased at almost the same rate as the overall number of Fundamental Rights cases in these categories. This suggests that class bias concerns that stem from the organizational advantages of the advantaged class are not as pronounced as some have feared.

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