बेबाक · Editorial
When Courts Must Oversee Forests, Weigh Bank Liability and Guard Their Own Orders, the Executive Has a Gap
Supreme Court and High Court orders this week show the judiciary stepping into spaces that regulators and governments should hold. Courts can push for that work but cannot replace it.
Three Orders, One Pattern
Three judicial actions point to the same thing. The Supreme Court has put a former Chief Justice of India in charge of a forest exercise in Tamil Nadu. It has told the Tamil Nadu government to provide all necessary logistical and administrative assistance, and told the committee to begin functioning immediately. The Court is also seeking bank liability for losses from digital arrest fraud, and wants to examine the Reserve Bank of India's draft of revised KYC guidelines before they are finalised. In Telangana, the High Court has issued Form-I notices to several senior government and HYDRAA officials in a contempt plea. The plea alleges they violated its earlier order restraining demolition of structures on private land in Sangareddy district.
The Core Tension
Each case may have a reasonable cause. The Court presumably judged that the Tamil Nadu forest exercise needed independent oversight. Victims of digital arrest fraud need clarity on who bears their losses. A demolition agency accused of ignoring a court order must answer for it. Yet taken together, the orders show courts doing work that ordinarily belongs to the executive. One court is overseeing a forest exercise. The same court wants to see a regulator's draft rules. Another is having to defend its own orders against state officials. Nobody designed this as a constitutional arrangement. It tends to grow where governments and regulators leave gaps.
The Strongest Case for Each Side
Those who defend judicial intervention make a serious argument. Article 21 means little if a citizen loses savings to impersonators while banks point to procedure. A forest is not protected by a file that no one acts on. If a High Court order can be ignored, the rule of law is just advice. The opposing argument is just as serious. Courts are not built to supervise administration or to answer to the public for administrative results. Retired judges overseeing administrative exercises can blur the separation of powers. When a court examines the RBI's KYC draft, it risks taking on the regulator's responsibility without its expertise. That can also make it harder to assign blame later if the rules fail.
What the Record Shows
The details matter. The RBI is expected to notify revised KYC guidelines by November 30. The Supreme Court's wish to examine the draft before it is finalised suggests it wants assurance that the rules will protect depositors, rather than leaving the matter wholly to the regulator. The Tamil Nadu order spells out that the state government must provide assistance, an instruction that would ideally go without saying. The Telangana case is the most serious. If the allegation is proven, officials acted as though a restraint order did not bind them. The allegation has yet to be tested, but contempt proceedings against state officials should concern anyone who values orderly government.
The Verdict
Each of these interventions can be defended on its facts. As a trend, they should worry us. When the executive falls short, courts are pulled in. The more they step in, the less pressure there is on the executive to perform. This does not look like a judiciary seeking power so much as basic governance work drifting to the bench. Both institutions lose. The courts take on duties they are not designed to carry out, and ministries and regulators lose the habit of carrying them out themselves.
A Workable Way Forward
The way out is to strengthen the executive, not to keep courts out. The RBI's revised KYC rules should, of their own accord, set out when banks are liable for digital arrest fraud losses, so courts need not decide it case by case. The Tamil Nadu government should publish the logistical and administrative support it gives the committee. It should then rebuild its own capacity so that judicial oversight can end on a set date. Telangana should require that any demolition by HYDRAA or similar agencies first be checked against pending court orders, with a named officer answerable for that check. The aim is for each institution to do its own job.
A court can order a committee to begin functioning immediately; it cannot make a state machinery want to function at all.
What this editorial rests on
Drawn from our live multi-newsroom feed — read the reporting at source.
An editorial is the considered opinion of the FarziUPSC desk, argued from the sourced reporting above and written under our published persona, बेबाक. We name institutions, not parties. If we are wrong, we will say so. How we work →