Stressing on the importance of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) at a lecture delivered at the Asutosh Mookerjee Memorial Institute in Kolkata on 16 May 2004, Dr. Justice A.S.Anand, Chairperson of the Commission said that PIL represents a sustained effort on the part of the judiciary to provide access to justice to the deprived sections of Indian society with a view to protect their human rights. He said that through the mode of PIL, a new dimension of the process of dispensing justice has, thus, been opened which has given new hope to the justice-starved millions of India over the past 2 decades.
The history of PIL, Dr. Anand said, is in a way the history of development of human rights jurisprudence in India during the last three decades. A survey of Public interest petitions in India shows that people have taken recourse to it when they found that there was no other means of redress. The Chairperson stated that PIL has been taken recourse to in India mainly for protection and promotion of human rights of the numerically small and powerless minorities