Article 37 Says No Court Can Enforce the Directive Principles, Yet Judges and Parliament Have Built a Right to Education, Equal Pay Rulings and Pollution Orders on Them

Article 37 of the Constitution of India says the provisions of Part IV “shall not be enforceable by any court,” and in the same sentence calls the principles in it “fundamental in the governance of the country.” Part IV, the Directive Principles of State Policy, runs from Article 36 to Article 51 and took effect on 26 January 1950, the day most of the Constitution did under Article 394. Part IVA, a single article on Fundamental Duties, was added from 3 January 1977.

No citizen can go to court and demand that a government carry out a directive principle. Even so, the Supreme Court and Parliament have drawn on these two Parts to shape a right to education, equal pay for equal work and orders against polluters.

What Part IV and Part IVA say

Part IV is a list of goals addressed to “the State.” Article 36 takes that term from Article 12, which covers the Government and Parliament of India, the governments and legislatures of the states, and “all local or other authorities.” The Drafting Committee’s chairman told the Assembly in 1948 that panchayats and local boards, which Article 12 covers, carry the principles out.

Goals range widely. Article 38 asks the State to “strive to promote the welfare of the people.” Article 39 aims at an adequate livelihood for men and women equally, a distribution of the community’s resources “as best to subserve the common good,” and “equal pay for equal work for both men and women.” Article 40 asks for village panchayats, Article 44 for a uniform civil code, Article 47 for better nutrition and public health, Article 48A for protection of the environment and Article 50 for a judiciary separate from the executive.

Parliament has edited the Part. Articles 39A (free legal aid), 43A and 48A came with the 42nd Amendment on 3 January 1977. Article 45 was replaced from 1 April 2010 by the 86th, and Article 43B on co-operative societies was added by the 97th from 15 February 2012.

Part IVA’s single article opens with “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India.” Its duties include respecting the Constitution, the National Flag and the National Anthem, protecting the natural environment and developing “the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.” The 42nd Amendment inserted ten. Clause (k), added by the 86th Amendment from 1 April 2010, makes it a parent’s or guardian’s duty to provide opportunities for education to a child aged six to fourteen.

Why the framers kept courts out

Enforceable rights and unenforceable directives were separated before the Assembly debated Part IV. Justice Bhagwati traced the history in his separate opinion in Minerva Mills (1980). In 1945 the Sapru Committee had pictured two classes of rights, one that courts enforce and one that they do not. Bhagwati wrote that the idea “perhaps” drew on the Irish Constitution of 1937, which called its second class Directive Principles of Social Policy. Benegal Narsing Rau, the constitutional adviser, backed a division, and the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee recommended two parts. At one stage the right to primary education sat in the list of Fundamental Rights while the equality clause sat in the other list.

He also quoted the Planning Commission’s reason for the gap: a state “just awakened to freedom” should not be called on at once to account for every new obligation.

On 19 November 1948 the Constituent Assembly took up the Part. K. T. Shah moved a substitute for draft Article 29, the one that became Article 37, making the provisions “enforceable in such manner and by such authority as may be deemed appropriate.” The House negatived it. Ananthasayanam Ayyangar argued that elections were the check, because voters could decline to return representatives indifferent to public opinion. “That is the real sanction, and not the sanction of any court of law,” he said.

Ambedkar defended keeping the word “directive.” The Assembly, he said, was giving “certain directions to the future legislature and the future executive” on how to use their powers, and the Part was not meant as “mere pious declarations.”

1951: a ranking, and the reply

A first test arrived a year after the Constitution took effect. Madras’s Communal Government Order divided seats in the state’s engineering and medical colleges by community. Of every 14 seats, 2 went to Brahmins and the other 12 were allotted by other community categories. Under Article 29(2), no one may be denied admission to a state-run or state-aided institution “on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them.” Madras argued that Article 46, the directive to promote the educational interests of weaker sections, justified the order.

On 9 April 1951 a bench of seven judges, with Justice Sudhi Ranjan Das delivering the judgment, held the order void. Because Article 37 makes the directives unenforceable, the Court said, they cannot override Part III, which courts enforce through writs under Article 32. The directive principles, it wrote, “have to conform to and run as subsidiary to the Chapter of Fundamental Rights.”

Parliament replied that June. Clause (4) of Article 15 came with the First Amendment, in force from 18 June 1951. It says nothing in Article 15 or in clause (2) of Article 29, the provision the Court had applied, shall stop the State from making special provision for socially and educationally backward classes or for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Judicial opinion softened too. In 1980 Bhagwati called the Champakam position “patently wrong,” and noted that the Court had already said in 1958, in the Kerala Education Bill reference, that it should try to give effect to both Parts as far as possible.

Education: a ten-year promise that became a right

Original Article 45 told the State to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to fourteen “within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution,” a period that ran out in January 1960.

On 4 February 1993, in Unni Krishnan v State of Andhra Pradesh, the Supreme Court held that the right to education up to fourteen flows from the right to life in Article 21, read with Articles 41 and 45.

Parliament wrote the result into the text with the 86th Amendment. Since 1 April 2010 Article 21A has said the State shall provide “free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years,” in a manner it fixes by law. A 2009 statute, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, requires aided and unaided schools to reserve 25 per cent of admissions for disadvantaged children. On 12 April 2012 the Supreme Court upheld that rule, with minority-run private schools exempt.

Panchayats, equal pay and polluted rivers

Article 40 asks the State to organise village panchayats and give them the powers to work “as units of self-government.” The 73rd Amendment added Part IX from 24 April 1993. It requires panchayats at village, intermediate and district levels in every state, with the intermediate tier optional in a state of up to 20 lakh (2 million) people. Seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population, and not less than one third go to women. A panchayat serves five years, and a dissolved one must be replaced by election within six months. An Eleventh Schedule lists 29 subjects, from agriculture to drinking water, that states may hand to panchayats. Because Article 243G says “may,” the extent of devolution depends on each state’s law. A government statement of 24 April 2026, reported by The Tribune, counts more than 2.5 lakh panchayats and 24.04 lakh elected representatives, 49.75 per cent of them women.

Equal pay under Article 39(d) was followed by the Equal Remuneration Act, in force from 8 March 1976. In Randhir Singh v Union of India (22 February 1982), Justice Chinnappa Reddy wrote that equal pay for equal work is “not expressly declared by our Constitution to be a fundamental right” but is “a constitutional goal,” and that it can be deduced from Articles 14 and 16 read with Article 39(d). It ordered Delhi Police driver-constables paid at least on par with Railway Protection Force drivers from 1 January 1973. Since 21 November 2025 the Code on Wages, 2019, which took effect with the other Labour Codes that day, has replaced the 1976 Act.

Both Article 48A and duty 51A(g) on the environment date from 3 January 1977. In Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum v Union of India (28 August 1996), a case over tannery waste in the Palar river in Tamil Nadu, the Supreme Court cited Articles 21, 47, 48A and 51A(g) and held that the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle are part of the country’s environmental law. It fined each tannery in five districts Rs 10,000 and ordered the money paid into an Environment Protection Fund for victims and for restoring the damaged environment.

1980: Minerva Mills and the balance

Inserted by the 25th Amendment from 20 April 1972, Article 31C protected laws meant to secure the aims in Article 39(b) and (c), on the distribution of resources and the concentration of wealth, from challenge under the equality and freedom articles. In Kesavananda Bharati (24 April 1973) the Court upheld the first part of the article and struck down the clause that stopped courts from asking whether a law served those aims. That case is told in the basic structure doctrine explained.

Then the 42nd Amendment extended Article 31C to laws serving “all or any of the principles laid down in Part IV.” A five-judge bench ordered that section void on 9 May 1980, and on 31 July 1980 Chief Justice Chandrachud gave the majority’s reasons. Fundamental Rights, he wrote, “are not an end in themselves but are the means to an end,” and the end is set out in Part IV. He concluded that “This harmony and balance between fundamental rights and directive principles is an essential feature of the basic structure of the Constitution.”

Bhagwati agreed on the other section struck down that day but would have upheld the amended Article 31C. Separately, he agreed with Justice Hegde that whether a mandate can be enforced in court “has no bearing on the importance of that mandate.” The rights side of the balance is covered in the guide to Articles 12 to 35.

Eleven duties that no writ enforces

Citizens’ duties entered the Constitution on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee, which the Congress Party appointed. A 2001 consultation paper issued under the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution places the addition in the Emergency period and notes that other amendments of those months affected the powers of the High Courts and the Supreme Court. Many 42nd Amendment changes were undone by the 44th Amendment of 1978, which left Article 51A untouched.

Duty as an idea is older than the article. The paper quotes the Supreme Court in 1969, in Chandra Bhavan v State of Mysore: “It is a fallacy to think that under our Constitution there are only rights and no duties.”

No penalty is attached to any duty in Article 51A itself. Justice Lahoti, in AIIMS Students Union v AIIMS (24 August 2001), wrote that duties “are not made enforceable by a writ of court just as the fundamental rights are,” but that they “provide a valuable guide and aid to interpretation of constitutional and legal issues.”

Courts have used them that way. Justice Ranganath Misra, in Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v State of Uttar Pradesh (1986), wrote of protecting the environment, “It is a social obligation,” and called it a duty under Article 51A(g). The paper’s authors argued that legislation is needed wherever duties are to bind citizens with legal sanctions.

The directive still waiting

Article 44 says the State “shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India,” meaning one set of family laws for marriage, divorce and inheritance. According to the Law Commission’s 2018 paper, the Assembly placed it among the directives instead of the rights because members disagreed on what a code would involve, and some feared it would deny freedom of religion. Ambedkar suggested in 1948 that a first code might apply only to those who declared themselves willing to be bound by it.

In the Shah Bano case of 1985 the Supreme Court said that “Article 44 of our Constitution has remained a dead letter.” The Law Commission’s consultation paper of 31 August 2018 took a different view of the present moment. It said it had dealt with discriminatory family laws “rather than providing a uniform civil code which is neither necessary nor desirable at this stage.”

Uttarakhand brought a state Uniform Civil Code into force on 27 January 2025. It covers marriage, divorce and inheritance, excludes Scheduled Tribes listed under Article 342, and requires online registration of marriages, divorces and live-in relationships. Uttarakhand calls it the first in India since independence.