AHMEDABAD: The Gujarat High Court has imposed a collective cost of Rs 1.4 crore on a group of seven unscrupulous litigants for filing a PIL seeking to cancel the development permission granted to a builder out of personal vendetta without disclosing their credentials.The division bench of Chief Justice Sunita Agarwal and Justice D N Ray dismissed the writ petition with exemplary cost of Rs 20,00,000, which is to be paid by each of the (seven) petitioners.The amount will go to the Gujarat State Legal Services Authority, which shall be utilised for the benefit of orphan children, it said in its order uploaded on its website on Monday.During the hearing of the matter last Friday, the court orally observed that there is no place for such unscrupulous litigants who have not disclosed their credentials in the writ petition.Who are these people, nobody knows. What business they are doing, what their occupation is, nothing. They are all independent persons, so (a cost of) Rs 20 lakh each, the court said.It expressly said that the question of entertaining the grievance would arise only when they disclose their credentials.The only description in the array of parties in a PIL is not sufficient to maintain it, it said.Our rules say and the law of PIL also says that whosoever is coming to the court as a public interest litigant, the responsibility is on that person to show that he is a public spirited person, it added.
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