A bench of Justices S Abdul Nazeer, BR Gavai, AS Bopanna, V Ramasubramanian and BV Nagarathna further said that parliament and State legislatures cannot visualise and provide for new, strange, unforeseen and unpredictable situations arising from the complexity of modern life and the ingenuity of modern man.
“It has been consistently held that parliament and the State legislatures are not bodies of expert or specialists. They are skilled in the art of discovering the aspirations, the expectations and the needs of the people whom they represent. It has been held that they function best when they concern themselves with general principles, broad objectives and fundamental issues instead of technical and situational intricacies which are better left to better equipped full time expert executive bodies and specialist public servants,” the Court said.
“It has been held that a good deal of latitude has to be held to be permissible in the case of taxing statutes and welfare legislations,” the bench underscored.
The observations were made in its judgment dismissing a batch of petitions challenging the Central government’s 2016 decision to demonetise currency notes of ₹1,000 and ₹500.
Justice BV Nagarathna delivered a dissenting verdict in the case holding that the Central government’s 2016 exercise was unlawful.
Source: Barandbench
