Supreme Court received 76,000 letter petitions; none of them fit to be writ
16 Dec, 2013
An application was filed with the Supreme Court of India under the Right to Information (RTI) Act seeking to get the details of the letter petitions received by the court in last five years and about the letters that were converted into writ petitions.
The reply from the court stated that it received around 1,50,000 letter petitions in past five years but only five of them were deemed fit to be considered as writ petition or public interest litigation. The data provided in the RTI reply said that the court got 20,821 letters in 2008 out of which three letters were treated as public interest litigation. The number of total letters received in 2009 and 2010 was 20,904 and 24,611 respectively and in both the years only one petition was converted into writ petitions.
According to the reply, total number of letters witnessed huge jump in 2011 and 2012 when the number of letter petitions received by the apex court were 35,026 and 41,314 respectively. But not even single letter received in the two years was found fit to be treated as writ petitions. The Supreme Court’s reply also said that at present there is not even a single letter petition pending with it.