For the set of cases involving women and children’s rights, these search terms, among others, were used: "women" and "children" and “abuse”; "violence" and "women" and "neglected children"; “juvenile justice" and "Article 21"; "trafficking" and "women" and "Article 21"; "labour" "children" and "Article 14" ; "custodial violence" and "children"; "education" "fundamental right" and "Article 14"; "gender and fundamental right"; "prison rights and children"; "rape" and "Article 21"; "emancipation" and "women and children." The SC/ST/OBC search used the terms “scheduled caste” or “scheduled tribe” or “other backward classes” in conjunction with cases that addressed Fundamental Rights and constitutional concerns. Note that the data from the Supreme Court were a listing of orders related to PIL cases, and not necessarily a list of cases per se. But an examination of the names of the cases revealed that of the 2,800 separate orders, instances of duplicate or once repeating nearly identical plaintiff and defendant names occurred fourteen times, triplicates once, and quadruplicates once. Still, because of uncertainty regarding the basis for the listings, this paper refers to this list as constituting “cases” rather then cases per se. The Manupatra database captures about 80-85% of Supreme Court cases.<sup>7</sup> While this results in something less than complete compendium of Court decisions and orders in the selected topic areas, there is no evidence that the database censors certain categories of cases in a systematic fashion. There is no evidence, in other words, of significant sample bias.

Figure 1 shows the number of PIL “cases” instituted per year, whether brought to the court for admission (“admission matters” in the Court’s terms) or argued on the merits (“regular matters”), from 1997-2007, based on data from the Supreme Court itself. The figure shows that there has been a slight upward trend in PIL matters over the last ten years. It also shows that there are some 260 “cases” instituted per year, on average. This compares to about 60,000 “cases” per year overall, based on data publicly available in the Supreme Court’s “Court News” publication. So, on average, some 0.4% of “cases” before the Court involve PILs. This suggests that PIL does not drain significant Court resources from the administration of day to day justice, contrary to the claims of some critics; but it also suggests that the outsize reputation of the Supreme Court’s PIL work belies its modest scale. And, contrary to popular conceptions, the large majority of the 260 or so PIL “cases” instituted in the Supreme Court each year are brought through formal channels; of the tens of thousands of letters and handwritten petitions that the Supreme Court receives from ordinary people each year, only a handful are converted into cases.<sup>8</sup> The Court instituted a classification system for PILs in 1988. This might be used to determine whether the concerns cited in PILs have changed over the years, and if the “cases” that appear before the Court have shifted to the concerns of the middle classes. Table 1 shows the breakdown by “case” type and year. Unfortunately, the large majority of “cases” fall in the category of “other,” so the classification scheme is not useful for tracking changes in PIL composition over time. Noteworthy, however, is the increase in “cases” related to election commissions, and the relatively low share of “cases” involving

> 7 Reported by Nick Robinson, based on personal communication with Manupatra staff, January 14, 2009. Also see the similar figure in (Shankar & Mehta, 2008)

> 8 Interviews with officers of the PIL section, Supreme Court, New Delhi, January 13, 2009.

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