ACTIVATORS OF JUDICIAL ACTIVISM‌

Upendra Baxi, an eminent jurist, has delineated the following typology of social / human rights activists who activated judicial activism6 :

1. Civil Rights Activists: These groups primarily focus on civil and political rights issues.

2. People Rights Activists: These groups focus on social and economic rights within the contexts of state repression of people’s movements.

3. Consumer Rights Groups: These formations raise issues of consumer rights within the framework of accountability of the polity and the economy.

4. Bonded Labour Groups: These groups ask for judicial activism is nothing short of annihilation of wage slavery in India.

5. Citizens for Environmental Action: These groups activate an activist judiciary to combat increasing environmental degradation and pollution.

6. Citizen Groups against Large Irrigation Projects: These activist formations ask the Indian judiciary the impossible for any judiciary in the world, namely, cease to and desist from ordering against mega irrigation projects.

7. Rights of Child Groups: These groups focus on child labour, the right to literacy, juveniles in custodial institutions and rights of children born to sex workers.

8. Custodial Rights Groups: These groups include social action by prisoners’ rights groups, women under state 'protective’ custody and persons under preventive detention.

9. Poverty Rights Groups: These groups litigate issues concerning draught and famine relief and urban impoverished.

10. Indigenous People’s Rights Groups: These groups agitate for issues of forest dwellers, citizens of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution and identity rights.

11. Women’s Rights Groups: These groups agitate for issues of gender equality, gender-based violence and harassment,

rape and dowry murders.

12. Bar-based Groups: These associations agitate for issues concerning autonomy and accountability of the Indian judiciary.

13. Media Autonomy Groups: These groups focus on the autonomy and accountability of the press and instruments of mass media owned by the State.

14. Assorted Lawyer-Based Groups: This category includes the critically influential lawyers’ groups which agitate for various causes.

15. Assorted Individual Petitioners: This category includes freelance activist individuals.