Why in news?

The Supreme Court recently used its special powers under Article 142 of the Constitution to quash FIRs filed against participants in nationwide exam protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).

This decision has renewed debate over a provision that gives the Court unusually wide powers — one that legal scholars have argued about since the Constitution was adopted.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• What Happened in the CJP Case?
• About Article 142
• How Has the Court Used This Power Before?
• Has the Court Tried to Limit Its Own Power?
• A Recurring Source of Controversy

What Happened in the CJP Case?

• A bench led by CJI Surya Kant, along with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana, closed cases linked to the July protests over the NEET-UG 2026 exam leak.
• The Centre told the Court it had "consciously decided" not to pursue these cases, and the Court also ordered compensation — within three months — for families of students who died by suicide over the leak.
• Nearly all FIRs from the protests were quashed, except those involving about 2,873 individuals with "serious and grave criminal antecedents."
• As part of the same hearing, CJP was asked to publicly commit to calling off a protest march planned for September 5.
• In effect, the Court became the platform through which the government fulfilled a demand CJP had made back in July.

About Article 142

• Article 142 allows the Supreme Court to pass any order necessary for "doing complete justice" in a case before it.
• Unusually for a constitutional provision, it does not define what "complete justice" means, or lay down when it can be used — leaving this entirely to the Court's discretion.
• Its roots go back to Section 210 of the Government of India Act, 1935, and further still, to the colonial-era practice of deciding cases based on "justice, equity and good conscience" when no written law applied.
• It appeared in the Draft Constitution as Article 118 and was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on May 27, 1949 — without any real debate.
• Essentially, its true scope was left for the Court to shape over the following decades, case by case.

How Has the Court Used This Power Before?

• Because it is so open-ended, Article 142 has become one of the Supreme Court's most frequently used tools. Some notable examples:
  • Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1989): Used to secure a $470 million settlement from Union Carbide, and to quash criminal cases against the company.
  • Ayodhya Title Dispute: Applied to resolve the case on "preponderance of probability," awarding five acres of land to the Muslim side.
  • A G Perarivalan's release (2022): Ordered release of a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.
• The Court has also used it to grant divorces where a marriage has "irretrievably broken down," and in various public interest cases
• An empirical study by IIM Ahmedabad researchers, examining all cases from 1950 to 2023 referencing "Article 142" or "complete justice," found 1,579 references and 791 direct invocations — mostly in civil matters.

Has the Court Tried to Limit Its Own Power?

• The Supreme Court is often called one of the most powerful constitutional courts in the world, largely because of how it uses Article 142.
• This power becomes even more significant in a "polyvocal" court, where 38 judges typically sit in small benches of two.
  • A "polyvocal" court is a supreme court that speaks through multiple small, independent benches rather than a single unified voice, leading to different or overlapping interpretations of the law.
  • The term is most famously used to describe the Supreme Court of India.
• The Court has occasionally tried to set boundaries on itself:
  • Prem Chand Garg v State of Uttar Pradesh (1962): Held that Article 142 orders must still respect fundamental rights and existing law.
  • Supreme Court Bar Association v Union of India (1998): Held that Article 142 can fill gaps left by a statute, but cannot override an existing statutory scheme.
• However, the Court has often departed from its own cautionary rulings.

Why Does the CJP Order Raise Concerns?

• Normally, an FIR is examined individually — under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita — to check whether an offence is genuinely made out, or whether the case is clearly malicious.
• In the CJP order, however, thousands of FIRs from multiple states were grouped together and quashed without individual scrutiny, as part of a negotiated deal between the government and a protest group.
• Legal scholars argued that criminal law provisions cannot be overridden through such a blanket judicial decree — since this bypasses the normal legal process, rather than simply filling a gap in it.

A Recurring Source of Controversy

• This isn't the first time Article 142 has drawn sharp criticism:
  • When the Court last year used the same provision to treat long-pending Tamil Nadu Bills as automatically assented to, the then Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar described it as a "nuclear missile" against democratic institutions.
  • Former Attorney General K K Venugopal wrote in 2017 that while the provision had done "tremendous good" for disadvantaged sections, it needed proper checks and balances.
  • After the Sabarimala judgment, he went further, calling Article 142 a "Kamdhenu from which unlimited powers flowed" (referring to the mythical wish-granting cow).
  • He suggested that only five-judge Constitution Benches should be allowed to invoke it — to prevent its use resting on the interpretation of a single small bench

Conclusion

Article 142 remains one of the Supreme Court's most powerful yet controversial tools — enabling it to deliver justice beyond the limits of ordinary law, but also raising concerns about judicial overreach when used to bypass established legal procedures.

The CJP case highlights this tension sharply, reviving long-standing calls for clearer limits on how and when this extraordinary power should be exercised.

About Reverse Vaccinology:

• It is an emerging concept in the field of vaccine development.
• It is defined as an innovative approach to vaccine development that utilizes bioinformatics and computational analysis.
• It identifies potential vaccine targets within pathogen genomes, allowing for the modeling of epitopes and the creation of tailored vaccines for improved efficacy and safety.
• Reverse vaccinology is a term coined by Rino Rappuoli in 2000.
• He described it as a method for vaccine design that uses the information obtainable from whole-genome analysis. 
• It was first applied to the development of a vaccine against serogroup B Neisseria meningitidis (MenB). 
• The concept of reverse vaccinology has also successfully been applied to many other pathogens, for example, Bacillus anthracis, Streptococcus pneumonia, M. tuberculosis.
• Mechanism:
• Genome Sequencing: It involves the cloning and expression of all the proteins in an organism’s genome sequence that are predicted in silico to be surface exposed or secreted.
• Screening: Then each protein is screened, through high-throughput immunization.
• Laboratory Testing: Scientists make the chosen proteins in a lab and test them in animal models to see if they safely cause immunity.

About Limiting Overshoot Report:

• It is released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
• It has for the first time, set out an overshoot, peak and decline pathway, warning that breaching the 1.5°C global warming limit is now unavoidable.
• Key highlights of the Report:
• Even a scenario in which every country delivers on its national climate plan and net-zero target puts peak warming at 1.8°C
• According to the report, current policies point to a rise of about 2.6°C by 2100, with a range of 1.9–3.6°C.
• It warned that time spent above 1.5°C carries compounding costs such as faster sea-level rise, coral reef collapse, glacier loss exceeding a quarter of global mass by 2100, declines of up to 14% in global food production by 2050 without effective adaptation,
• Irreversible tipping points in the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and the Amazon.
• It placed significant stress on methane and suggested that cutting it is described as the most effective way to slow warming in the near term.

About Northern Goshawk:

• It is a large, powerful bird of prey belonging to the Accipitridae family.
• Distribution: It is widely distributed across Europe, Asia, and parts of North America.
• Habitat: It is found in dense forests, particularly coniferous and mixed woodlands.

Features

• Appearance: It has relatively short, broad wings and a long tail. Females are significantly larger than males.
• These are partial migrants, generally migrates between September and November and February to April in the spring.
• These birds are diurnal and are always found singly or in pairs.
• They are highly territorial and maintain their home ranges in display flights.
• These are powerful hunters and mainly use a perch-hunting style;
• Perch-hunting style includes a series of quick flights low to the ground, interspersed with brief periods of scanning for unsuspecting prey from elevated perches (short duration sit-and-wait predatory movements).
• Conservation Status:
• IUCN Red List: Least Concern

About Osbeckia ulotricha:

• It is a newly identified flowering plant that belongs to the Melastomataceae family. 
• It has been discovered in the shola grasslands of the Agasthyamala Biosphere Reserve in the Western Ghats.
• Characteristics
• It is a woolly-haired species endemic to elevations of 1,200–1,500 metres.
• It leaves clustered at the apex, a sub-globose hypanthium (or an almost round flower base) and an ovary crowned with true bristles, meaning fine, stiff hairs at the top.
• The species flowers and fruits between February and May
• Habitat: It grows mainly in the damp margins of Tropical Montane Wet Temperate Forest (shola) and Montane Temperate Grassland ecosystems.
• It has an urn-shaped hypanthium (a cup-like flower base) with a neck. 

Key Features of Agasthyamala Biosphere Reserve

• Location: It is located in the southern part of the Western Ghats in India, spreading across Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
• The reserve was established in 2001 and later included in the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves in 2016.
• Vegetation: It consists of variety of vegetation types such as tropical evergreen forests, semi-evergreen forests, moist deciduous forests, montane Agasthyamalai B rainforests, and shola-grassland ecosystems.
• Rivers: Important Rivers such as Thamirabarani, Neyyar, and Karamana originate from this region.
• The biosphere reserve includes several important protected regions, namely: Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary, Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary, Neyyar Wildlife Sanctuary and Kalakkad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve.

About BIO-NIVESH Platform:

• It is aimed at connecting biotechnology startups with investors and increasing private capital for innovations that are ready for scale-up and commercialisation.
• It is envisaged as a recurring platform, with subsequent editions proposed across different cities to broaden participation.
• It has been designed as a two-way engagement mechanism which enables innovators to understand the investment lens while giving investors deeper insight into the scientific, regulatory and development pathways of biotechnology.
• The inaugural BIO-NIVESH edition brought together 20 high-potential biotechnology and deep-tech startups and around 50 investors.
• The first session featured direct startup-investor interactions, with startups selected on the basis of innovation, development stage, market potential, scalability and regulatory readiness.
• The second session involved an interaction between minister, investors and startups on access to capital, commercialisation, scale-up and measures to support innovation-led growth.
• Significance: It would help build the bridge required to take promising ideas from research and entrepreneurship to industry, scale and markets.

About AgriStack:

• It is a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for the farm sector.
• It is an initiative under the Digital Agriculture Mission (DAM) and was approved by the Union Cabinet in September 2024.
• It comprises three foundational registries or databases in the agriculture sector:
• The Farmer Registry, Geo-referenced village maps, and the Crop Sown Registry, all created and maintained by the State Governments or Union Territories.
• Farmer Registry:
  • Under the AgriStack, farmers are given digital identities (Farmer ID), which are linked dynamically to the State’s land records, livestock ownership, crops sown, demographic details, family details, schemes, and benefits availed.
  • Target: The government aims to create digital identities for 11 crore farmers.
  • The Centre has allocated financial support to states to create their respective registries under the Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment.
  • Advantage: A farmer would be able to access benefits and services digitally.
  • The Centre aims to complete the Farmer Registry with dynamic Records of Rights (RoR) synchronisation by March 2027. In the Northeastern States, the target was set to March 2028.
• Crop Sown Registry:
  • It includes details on crops planted by farmers.
  • This is recorded through mobile-based Digital Crop Surveys on the ground each season.
• Geo-Referenced Village Map Registry:
  • It comprises geographic information of land records linked with their locations (latitudes and longitudes).
  • The target is to cover all villages by March 2027.
• Once fully implemented, Agristack will enable farmers to receive several benefits through a paperless and contactless digital ecosystem, including:
  • Paperless and contactless crop loan facilities.
  • Transparent and efficient crop insurance claim settlement.
  • Timely availability of agricultural inputs.
  • Personalized advisories on pests and diseases.
  • Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) of government scheme benefits.
  • Procurement of agricultural produce at the Minimum Support Price (MSP).
• Agristack will enable the Government to deliver services to farmers in a more transparent, efficient, and technology-driven manner while improving the accessibility and effectiveness of agricultural support systems.

About Ophiorrhiza assamensis:

• It is a new species of flowering plant.
• It was found growing in a moist, shaded patch of habitat near Guwahati, Assam.
• It is a perennial herb with large, ribbed leaves and clusters of small white flowers.
• It belongs to the genus Ophiorrhiza, which sits in the Rubiaceae family, the same family that gives us coffee.
• The Ophiorrhiza genus is known as a natural source of camptothecin, a compound used in the development of medicines for cancers, including colon cancer.
• It is currently known only from a highly localised population, making it vulnerable to deforestation and development-related changes in its habitat.
• As the species’ total population remains unknown, the researchers classified it as ‘Data Deficient’ under the IUCN criteria.

About ‘RAKSHA’ framework:

• It is a comprehensive strategic framework outlining India’s road map and vision for defence diplomacy and global defence partnerships over the next 10 years.
• The document seeks to strengthen India’s strategic engagement with friendly nations by aligning national security objectives with proactive international cooperation.
• It lays down an actionable vision aimed at promoting long-term stability, strengthening partnerships, and advancing India’s role in an evolving global security environment.
• Key pillars highlighted in the strategic blueprint include:
  • Strategic Partnerships: Deepening bilateral and multilateral security cooperation.
  • Capacity Building: Enhancing joint military exercises, training programmes, and sharing best practices with friendly nations.
  • Indigenous Exports: Promoting Make-in-India defence platforms to establish the nation as a reliable global defence manufacturing hub.
  • Maritime security: Strengthening India’s role as a Net Security Provider and First Responder in the Indian Ocean Region.