Fundamental Duties and Directive Principles of State Policy

Part IV of the Constitution contains promises no court will enforce; Part III contains rights every court must. That single asymmetry produced the longest-running quarrel in Indian constitutional law, consuming five constitutional amendments, four Constitution Benches and, in November 2024, a bench of nine judges. Part IVA, inserted in the middle of that quarrel, turned the same question around and pointed it at the citizen. The three Parts are best read as one argument about what a constitution can promise, what it can compel, and what it can only recommend.

The Ancestry of the Directive Principles

Ireland, and Ireland’s own borrowing

• The Irish Constitution of 1937 is the immediate model. Its Article 45 is headed “Directive Principles of Social Policy” and states that those principles are for the general guidance of the Oireachtas alone and shall not be cognisable by any court. Part IV takes over the device, the label and very nearly the formula.
  • Ireland had itself borrowed. The Irish article descends from the Spanish Republican Constitution of 1931, the first European text to write social and economic aims into a constitution without attaching a remedy to them.
  • The appeal to Indian framers was practical rather than sentimental. Another anti-colonial, largely agrarian, newly sovereign state had found a way of naming redistributive goals in a supreme-law document without promising remedies it could not fund.
• The domestic precursor is the Instrument of Instructions. The Government of India Act 1935 was accompanied by an Instrument of Instructions issued to the Governor-General and provincial Governors, telling them how to exercise a discretion that no court would review.
  • Ambedkar made the descent explicit rather than concealing it.

“The Directive Principles are like the Instrument of Instructions which were issued to the Governor-General and to the Governors of the colonies of India by the British Government under the Government of India Act of 1935. What is called Directive Principles is merely another name for the Instrument of Instructions. The only difference is that they are instructions to the legislature and the executive.” — B. R. Ambedkar

The Sapru Committee and the two categories of rights

• The Sapru Committee of 1945, chaired by Tej Bahadur Sapru, supplied the analytical move that made Part IV possible: it proposed dividing rights into justiciable and non-justiciable classes.
  • Justiciable rights were those a court could realistically deliver by striking down a law or restraining an officer — essentially negative liberties.
  • Non-justiciable rights were those requiring money, administration and time, which no decree can conjure. The Committee proposed to state them anyway, as standards of governance.
• The Assembly adopted the split administratively. The Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee under Sardar Patel, working from drafts by K. M. Munshi, B. N. Rau and Ambedkar, sorted one long list of desiderata into the enforceable and the non-enforceable.
  • Sir B. N. Rau, Constitutional Adviser to the Assembly, was the conduit for the Irish precedent and argued the case for a declaratory chapter that would bind the conscience of governments without binding the hands of courts.

The Objectives Resolution and Ambedkar’s larger design

• The Objectives Resolution, moved by Nehru on 13 December 1946 and adopted on 22 January 1947, promised social, economic and political justice, equality of status and opportunity, and safeguards for minorities and depressed classes. Part IV is the operational translation of that promise.
• Ambedkar found the Resolution insufficiently concrete, wanting a committed economic programme rather than a statement of aspiration.
  • His memorandum States and Minorities had proposed nationalisation of land, of key industries and of insurance, with agriculture run as a state industry and every citizen covered by compulsory social insurance.
  • That programme was refused on the ground that such questions were better left to ordinary legislation. Ambedkar afterwards said he would have preferred Part IV itself to carry a rigorous and justiciable scheme of social reconstruction.
• The result is a compromise document. Part IV states socialist ends inside a constitution whose Part III is liberal in structure, which is precisely why the two were destined to collide.

Article 37: What Non-Justiciability Actually Means

• Article 37 is the hinge of the whole Part, and its three limbs must be read together: the provisions of Part IV “shall not be enforceable by any court”; the principles are “nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country”; and “it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws.”
  • The first limb removes the remedy; the second and third assert an obligation.
  • Non-justiciable is not the same as non-binding. A directive that supports no writ can still make a law constitutionally defensible, can control how an ambiguous statute is read, and can supply the standard of reasonableness against which a restriction on a fundamental right is judged.
• Article 36 borrows the definition of “State” from Article 12, so Part IV addresses exactly the authorities Part III restrains. The same body is simultaneously limited by Part III and directed by Part IV — the structural source of the conflict.

Why the Assembly withheld enforceability — three reasons, not one

• Resources. A new state with a thin tax base could not guarantee work, a living wage, schooling, nutrition and public health on pain of a court order. Enforceable social rights would have become promises certain to be broken, and a constitution routinely disobeyed loses authority faster than one candid about its limits.
• Institutional competence. The principles demand budgetary and legislative choices — how much, on whom, in what order — that courts are ill-equipped to make and cannot be held accountable for.
• The electorate as the enforcement mechanism. Their force was designed to operate politically rather than judicially.

“If any government ignores them, they will certainly have to answer for them before the electorate at the election time.” — B. R. Ambedkar

What Part IV actually contains

• Goals for the society — a social order informed by justice, minimised inequalities of income and status, an economy that does not concentrate wealth.
• Entitlements individuals ought to enjoy beyond Part III — work, education, public assistance, a living wage, legal aid, nutrition.
• Policies the government ought to adopt — panchayats, cottage industry, prohibition, cattle protection, a uniform civil code, environmental care, separation of the judiciary.

Non-justiciability was a statement about the state’s capacity in 1950, not a verdict on the importance of what Part IV promised.

The Critics of Part IV and the Answers to Them

The charge sheet

• K. T. Shah was the sharpest voice in the Assembly, dismissing the Part as “pious superfluities” and comparing it to a cheque on a bank payable only when the resources of the bank permit — a promise whose date of payment the promisor alone fixes.
• Nasiruddin Ahmad thought the directives no better than new year’s resolutions, broken on the second of January, and objected that unenforceable matter in a supreme-law text cheapens the text.
• T. T. Krishnamachari called the chapter “a veritable dustbin of sentiments”, a jibe at its miscellaneous quality — cattle and cottage industry sitting beside international arbitration.
• Somnath Lahiri, the sole Communist member, attacked the design from the other end. His complaint about Part III frames the whole scheme: rights hedged by provisos are not rights, and a state cautious about liberty was unlikely to prove generous about welfare.

“I feel that many of these fundamental rights have been framed from the point of view of a police constable.” — Somnath Lahiri

• K. C. Wheare placed Part IV outside constitutional law proper, calling it “a manifesto of aims and aspirations” and a moral homily rather than an operative provision.
• Ivor Jennings delivered the most quoted verdict — that Part IV expresses “Fabian socialism without the socialism”, the vocabulary of gradual reform stripped of the machinery that would deliver it. He added that Parts III and IV rest on no consistent philosophy.
• N. Srinivasan objected on drafting grounds: the directives are neither properly classified nor logically arranged, and the formulation is vague and repetitive, the same idea recurring under different articles.
• K. Santhanam identified a separate danger — that the directives would generate constitutional conflict on three axes: Centre against states, President against Prime Minister, and Governor against Chief Minister, each able to invoke Part IV against the other’s policy.
• Alan Gledhill belongs with Wheare among external commentators who read Part IV as declaratory rather than operative — valuable as a statement of purpose, incapable of generating an entitlement.

Four structural objections

• A non-enforceable Part weakens a justiciable document. If one Part may be ignored without consequence, the habit of selective compliance can spread to the rest.
• It creates discretion without a standard. Nothing ranks the directives, so almost any policy can be justified by pointing to some article of Part IV.
• It binds future governments. Successors are told what ends to pursue by a body that will never again face an electorate — a live objection to writing economic doctrine into a constitution.
• It intrudes on federalism. Many Part IV subjects — public health, agriculture, panchayats, prohibition — sit in the State List, so a Union-drafted directive speaks to matters the Union may not legislate upon.

The defence

• Sir B. N. Rau answered that they are moral precepts for the authorities of the state with at least an educative value — the most modest claim and the hardest to refute.
• M. C. Setalvad described Part IV as an Instrument of Instructions for the state: not enforceable, but the background against which state action is assessed, a guide to judicial review, and an amplification of the Preamble.
• Granville Austin supplied the framing that outlasted the rest. Parts III and IV together are “the conscience of the Constitution”, twin instruments of the social revolution the document exists to accomplish; they form a seamless web, and sorting them into rival camps misreads the design.
• L. M. Singhvi called the directives “the life giving provisions of the Constitution”, carrying its philosophy of social justice.
• M. C. Chagla put it at its most generous: if the principles were fully carried out, the country would indeed be a heaven on earth.
• The decisive practical answer is that the directives contain the positive obligations of the state. If Part III secures political democracy, Part IV is the instruction to build the economic democracy without which political democracy does not last.

Classification of the Directive Principles

The four-fold division below is conventional rather than textual — the Constitution draws no such lines, and several articles sit in more than one head. Its value is that it exposes the three distinct political philosophies the Assembly wrote into one Part, which is the source of both its richness and its incoherence.

Article	Direction to the State	Head
36	Defines “State” as in Article 12	Definitional
37	Non-enforceable yet fundamental in governance; duty to apply in making laws	Definitional
38(1)	Secure a social order in which social, economic and political justice informs all national institutions	Socialistic
38(2)	Minimise inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities — 44th Amendment, 1978	Socialistic
39(a)	Adequate means of livelihood for all citizens equally	Socialistic
39(b)	Material resources of the community so distributed as best to subserve the common good	Socialistic
39(c)	Economic system not to produce concentration of wealth to the common detriment	Socialistic
39(d)	Equal pay for equal work for men and women	Socialistic
39(e)	Health and strength of workers and children not abused; no one forced by economic necessity into unsuitable work	Socialistic
39(f)	Children given opportunities to develop in freedom and dignity; youth protected from exploitation	Socialistic
39A	Equal justice and free legal aid — 42nd Amendment, 1976	Socialistic
40	Village panchayats as units of self-government	Gandhian
41	Right to work, education and public assistance in unemployment, old age, sickness, disablement	Socialistic
42	Just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief	Socialistic
43	Living wage, decent standard of life, and cottage industries in rural areas	Socialistic / Gandhian
43A	Participation of workers in management of industry — 42nd Amendment, 1976	Socialistic
43B	Promotion of co-operative societies — 97th Amendment, 2011	Gandhian
44	Uniform civil code throughout the territory of India	Liberal-intellectual
45	Early childhood care and education for children below six — recast by the 86th Amendment, 2002	Liberal-intellectual
46	Promote interests of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and weaker sections	Gandhian
47	Raise nutrition, standard of living and public health; prohibition of intoxicating drinks and injurious drugs	Socialistic / Gandhian
48	Agriculture and animal husbandry on modern lines; prohibit slaughter of cows and draught cattle	Gandhian / Liberal-intellectual
48A	Protect and improve the environment, safeguard forests and wildlife — 42nd Amendment, 1976	Liberal-intellectual
49	Protect monuments and objects of national importance	Liberal-intellectual
50	Separation of the judiciary from the executive in the public services	Liberal-intellectual
51	Promote international peace and security, respect for international law and treaty obligations, and settlement of disputes by arbitration	International

What the amendments reveal

• The 42nd Amendment (1976) added the three most consequential directives — 39A on legal aid, 43A on worker participation and 48A on the environment. The amendment remembered for the Emergency also produced the constitutional foundation of Indian environmental law.
• The 44th Amendment (1978) added 38(2) on minimising inequalities of income, status, facilities and opportunities, importing an explicitly egalitarian standard the original text lacked.
• The 97th Amendment (2011) added 43B along with Part IXB. In Union of India v. Rajendra N. Shah (2021) the Supreme Court struck down Part IXB so far as it applied to co-operative societies within a state, for want of state ratification under Article 368(2) — but 43B survived, because a directive needs no ratification.
• The 86th Amendment (2002) rewrote 45, moving schooling for six to fourteen into Part III as Article 21A and leaving Article 45 to cover early childhood care below six. The same amendment added the eleventh fundamental duty.

Directives that sit outside Part IV

• Article 335 — claims of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to services and posts to be taken into consideration consistently with efficiency of administration.
• Article 350A — facilities for instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage for children of linguistic minorities, inserted by the 7th Amendment (1956).
• Article 351 — the Union’s duty to promote the spread of Hindi as a medium of expression for India’s composite culture.
• The directive technique is therefore not confined to Articles 36 to 51. The Constitution reaches for non-justiciable instruction wherever it wants to state an obligation it cannot guarantee, which makes Part IV a method as much as a chapter.

The Implementation Record

The honest test of whether the directives are pious declarations or clear directions is not what commentators said but what legislatures did. Article by article the record is uneven: some directives generated whole bodies of enforceable statutory rights, some produced symbolic legislation, and a few have gone untouched for seventy-five years.

Redistribution of land — Articles 39(b) and (c)

• Zamindari abolition was the first and largest exercise in giving effect to Part IV. Every major state legislated between 1950 and 1956 to extinguish intermediary tenures, and the First Amendment (1951) inserted Articles 31A and 31B and the Ninth Schedule expressly to shield those laws from Part III challenge.
• Ceiling and tenancy legislation followed — ceilings on holdings, conferment of ownership on tenants, consolidation of fragments. Operation Barga in West Bengal and the Kerala Land Reforms Act 1963 are the two cases usually cited as substantially successful.
• The outcome divides sharply. Abolition of intermediaries succeeded and permanently altered rural power; ceiling-surplus redistribution touched only a small fraction of operated area, defeated by exemptions, benami transfers and unreliable land records.
• Article 39(b) later justified bank nationalisation, coal and mineral nationalisation and urban land ceilings — and is the exact provision the Supreme Court reopened in 2024.

Local self-government — Article 40

• Ambedkar opposed the article. He regarded the idealisation of the Indian village as a romantic error concealing caste domination, and yielded only when the Assembly went against him.

“What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?” — B. R. Ambedkar

• The directive lay dormant for four decades. The Balwant Rai Mehta Committee (1957) and Ashok Mehta Committee (1978) produced schemes that states implemented and abandoned at will, because panchayats had no constitutional protection.
• The 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992), in force from 24 April and 1 June 1993, converted the directive into structure: elections every five years, State Election Commissions, State Finance Commissions, reservation for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women, and the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules of devolvable subjects.
• Devolution remains the weak link. The Union’s Status of Devolution to Panchayats ranking, released in February 2025, again found functions transferred far more readily than funds and functionaries, leaving elected panchayats dependent on tied grants and state line departments.

Labour, wages and conditions of work — Articles 41, 42, 43, 43A

• Article 43’s living wage produced the Minimum Wages Act 1948; Article 42’s humane conditions of work the Factories Act 1948 and the Maternity Benefit Act 1961, extended in 2017 to twenty-six weeks of paid leave.
• Article 39(d)’s equal pay produced the Equal Remuneration Act 1976; Article 41’s public assistance the Employees’ State Insurance Act 1948 and the Employees’ Provident Funds Act 1952.
• The Code on Wages 2019 consolidated four wage statutes and for the first time extended a statutory minimum wage to all employment, organised or not, with a national floor wage binding on the states.
• All four labour codes came into force on 21 November 2025, replacing twenty-nine central labour laws and bringing gig and platform workers within a social-security framework. Critics read the same codes as a retreat from Article 43, since they raise the retrenchment-approval threshold to three hundred workers and narrow collective bargaining.
• Article 43A is the least implemented directive in the Part. Beyond works committees under the Industrial Disputes Act, the Participation of Workers in Management Bill 1990 lapsed and was never revived.

Access to justice — Article 39A

• The Legal Services Authorities Act 1987, brought into force in 1995, created NALSA and a tiered structure of state, district and taluk authorities, giving statutory shape to the 42nd Amendment’s directive.
• Lok Adalats and Permanent Lok Adalats for public utility services dispose of compoundable and settled matters at scale, and National Lok Adalat days clear pendency in bulk.
• The directive also migrated into Part III. In Hussainara Khatoon (1979), Khatri v. State of Bihar and Sukh Das v. Union Territory of Arunachal Pradesh (1986), the Court read free legal aid into Article 21 as an element of fair procedure — an early instance of the mechanism by which Part IV becomes enforceable.

Employment guarantee — Article 41

• MGNREGA 2005 was the most direct statutory rendering of Article 41’s right to work: a legal guarantee of one hundred days of unskilled manual work per rural household, with an unemployment allowance if work is not supplied within fifteen days.
• The delivery gap is wide. Average employment has hovered near fifty days, and in 2025-26 only about 1.4 per cent of participating households completed the full hundred, with substantial pending wage and material dues.
• The Act has now been replaced. The Viksit Bharat — Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, passed by both Houses on 18 December 2025, raises the guarantee to 125 days, restructures funding to a 60:40 Centre-state split in place of near-total central funding, concentrates works on water security, rural infrastructure, livelihood assets and climate resilience, and permits an annual agricultural pause of up to sixty days.
• The change is constitutionally instructive. Article 41 is satisfied by a statutory guarantee, not by any particular one; but shifting forty per cent of the cost to states tests whether a directive addressed to “the State” is discharged by relocating the burden.

Education — Articles 45, 46 and 21A

• Unni Krishnan (1993) held that the right to education flows from Article 21 read with Articles 41, 45 and 46 and was enforceable up to the age of fourteen — the clearest early demonstration that a directive could acquire teeth through Part III.
• The 86th Amendment (2002) made the position express by inserting Article 21A, recasting Article 45 as early childhood care below six and adding the parental duty in Article 51A(k).
• The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, in force 1 April 2010, gave the right operational content: neighbourhood schools, prescribed pupil-teacher ratios, a ban on capitation fees and screening, and a 25 per cent reservation for disadvantaged children in private unaided schools.
• The quota was upheld in Society for Un-aided Private Schools of Rajasthan v. Union of India (2012); Pramati Educational Trust (2014) then exempted minority institutions under Article 30, materially shrinking its reach.
• Coverage and quality remain unfinished. The Act reaches only six to fourteen, leaving pre-primary and secondary schooling outside the right, and successive learning surveys show attainment lagging enrolment — universal access achieved, universal learning not.

Nutrition, food and public health — Article 47

• The National Food Security Act 2013 converted the directive to raise the level of nutrition into a legal entitlement covering 75 per cent of the rural and 50 per cent of the urban population, roughly 81.35 crore persons, with statutory grievance redress.
• Free foodgrain under PMGKAY was extended for five years from 1 January 2024, and the Act absorbed the mid-day meal and ICDS programmes as entitlements rather than discretionary schemes.
• The judicial route ran ahead of the statute. The right-to-food litigation, PUCL v. Union of India (2001 onwards), converted existing food schemes into enforceable orders under Article 21 a decade before Parliament legislated.
• On public health the record is thinner. The National Health Mission (2005) and Ayushman Bharat (2018) — the latter offering five lakh rupees of hospitalisation cover per family and extended in October 2024 to all citizens aged seventy and above irrespective of income — represent real expansion. Yet public health expenditure remains near two per cent of GDP against the 2.5 per cent target of the National Health Policy 2017, and out-of-pocket spending is still the largest single source of health financing.

Environment — Article 48A

• The Water Act 1974 and the Air Act 1981 were enacted under Article 253, using India’s obligations under the 1972 Stockholm Declaration to legislate on State List subjects — proof that Article 51 has operative consequences.
• Articles 48A and 51A(g), both inserted in 1976, supplied a domestic constitutional footing, and the 42nd Amendment simultaneously moved forests and protection of wild animals and birds from the State List to the Concurrent List.
• The statutory architecture — Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972, Forest (Conservation) Act 1980, Environment (Protection) Act 1986, Biological Diversity Act 2002, National Green Tribunal Act 2010 — is in sheer volume the fullest legislative response to any directive.

Prohibition — Article 47

• Article 47’s second limb directs the state to bring about prohibition of intoxicating drinks and drugs injurious to health; it is the directive most often invoked and most often abandoned.
• Gujarat has enforced prohibition since 1960 under the Bombay Prohibition Act 1949, upheld in part in State of Bombay v. F. N. Balsara (1951); Nagaland has prohibited liquor since 1989; Bihar imposed total prohibition in 2016.
• Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Kerala and Mizoram each introduced and then reversed prohibition, defeated by revenue loss, smuggling and enforcement costs.
• Bihar is the sharpest test. The Bihar Prohibition and Excise Act 2016 generated mass arrests, prison overcrowding and a caseload that overwhelmed the state’s courts, drawing repeated judicial criticism, while hooch tragedies continued. A directive pursued without the administrative capacity to enforce it can damage the very interests it names.

Cattle and Article 48

• Mohd. Hanif Quareshi v. State of Bihar (1958) held a total ban on the slaughter of all cattle to be an unreasonable restriction on the butcher’s right under Article 19(1)(g), since Article 48 speaks of cows, calves and other milch and draught cattle — animals still useful.
• State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat (2005), a seven-judge bench, overruled that reasoning and upheld a total ban on the slaughter of bulls and bullocks of any age.
  • The Court held that a directive principle and a fundamental right are complementary, not antagonistic, that the legislature must balance them, and that Article 48 read with Article 51A(g) — compassion for living creatures — rendered the restriction reasonable.
  • This is the high-water mark of the interpretive use of Part IV against Part III: a non-justiciable directive and a non-enforceable duty together sustained a complete prohibition on a lawful trade.

Separation of the judiciary — Article 50

• The Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 implemented the directive by separating the judicial magistracy, placed under the High Courts, from the executive magistracy under the state government — replacing an arrangement in which the district officer both prosecuted and tried.
• The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023, in force from 1 July 2024, preserves that separation unchanged.
• The directive is not wholly realised. Executive magistrates retain preventive and public-order powers, but the Court has since made judicial independence part of the basic structure, effectively promoting a Part IV instruction into an unamendable feature.

The uniform civil code — Article 44

• Article 44 was contested in the Assembly itself. Ambedkar defended a uniform code but conceded it might have to begin as voluntary, in the way the Shariat Act 1937 had been applied.
• The courts have exhorted repeatedly and without effect — in Shah Bano (1985), Sarla Mudgal (1995) and John Vallamattom (2003), each time observing that Article 44 has remained a dead letter.
• Goa is the older anomaly. The Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 continued in force after 1961, giving Goa a common civil code by historical accident rather than legislative choice.
• Uttarakhand enacted the first state uniform civil code, passed on 7 February 2024 and in force from 27 January 2025. It lays down uniform rules of marriage, divorce, succession and maintenance, bans polygamy and child marriage, requires registration of live-in relationships, and exempts Scheduled Tribes.
  • It is under challenge on Articles 14, 21 and 25, principally over the live-in registration regime and the tribal exemption, which critics argue defeats the uniformity claimed for it.
• The Law Commission has moved in both directions. The 21st Commission’s consultation paper of 2018 concluded that a uniform civil code was “neither necessary nor desirable at this stage”; the 22nd Commission reopened public consultation in 2023.

International peace — Article 51

• Article 51 underpins India’s treaty practice, and read with Article 253 it lets Parliament legislate on State List subjects to implement an international obligation.
• The courts have used it to fill legislative gaps. Vishaka (1997) drew on CEDAW to frame binding guidelines against workplace sexual harassment; NALSA (2014) invoked international principles in recognising transgender identity.

Directive to statute: a summary

Directive	Principal implementing measure	Assessment
39(b), (c)	Zamindari abolition, ceiling laws, nationalisation statutes	Intermediaries abolished; ceiling redistribution largely failed
40	73rd and 74th Amendments (1992)	Structure created; fiscal devolution incomplete
39A	Legal Services Authorities Act 1987, NALSA, Lok Adalats	Institutionalised; quality of aid uneven
41	MGNREGA 2005, now the VB-G RAM G Act 2025	Legally guaranteed; delivery far below entitlement
42, 43	Factories, Maternity Benefit and Minimum Wages Acts; labour codes, 2025	Extensive; living wage still unrealised
43A	Works committees only	Substantially unimplemented
45 / 21A	RTE Act 2009, after Unni Krishnan and the 86th Amendment	Access near-universal; learning outcomes weak
47 (nutrition)	National Food Security Act 2013, PMGKAY	Most successful conversion of a directive into a right
47 (health)	National Health Mission, Ayushman Bharat	Coverage expanding; public spending stagnant
47 (prohibition)	Gujarat, Bihar and Nagaland statutes	Contested and frequently reversed
48	State cattle-slaughter laws; Mirzapur Moti Kureshi (2005)	Judicially upheld; socially divisive
48A	EPA 1986, NGT Act 2010 and allied statutes	Dense architecture; enforcement contested
50	CrPC 1973, now BNSS 2023	Largely achieved
44	Uttarakhand UCC 2024; Goa’s 1867 code	Unimplemented nationally for seventy-five years
51	Treaty practice under Article 253	Operative through legislation and judgments

Directive Principles in an Era of Liberalisation and Globalisation

The case that Part IV became obsolete

• The 1991 reforms reversed the economic assumptions of Part IV. Industrial licensing was dismantled, public-sector monopolies opened, foreign investment invited and disinvestment begun — a direct retreat from the vision in 39(b) and (c) of the state as principal owner and allocator of material resources.
• A directive addressed to an allocating state loses purchase when the state stops allocating. If prices, investment and employment are set by markets, an instruction to distribute resources for the common good has no obvious addressee.
• Fiscal rules narrowed the redistributive space. The FRBM Act 2003 and successive deficit targets made the budgetary discretion on which Part IV depends a scarcer commodity.
• Competition policy replaced the anti-concentration mandate. Article 39(c)’s concern with concentration of wealth was handed over to the Competition Act 2002, which polices market power on efficiency grounds rather than on grounds of social justice — a different objective wearing similar language.
• The World Trade Organization and investment treaties further constrained the instruments — subsidies, local-content rules, procurement preferences — through which a state might once have pursued Part IV objectives.

The case that Part IV mattered more, not less

• The liberalisation decades produced the densest cluster of welfare statutes in Indian history. RTI 2005, MGNREGA 2005, the Forest Rights Act 2006, the RTE Act 2009, the National Food Security Act 2013 and the land acquisition statute of 2013 all fall inside the period in which the state was supposedly withdrawing.
• This is the rights-based turn. Each converted a Part IV directive into a statutory entitlement with an addressee, a timeline and a grievance mechanism — the state ceased to promise and began to owe.
• Three forces produced it. Coalition politics placed welfare on the bargaining table; public interest litigation — above all the right-to-food case — made non-delivery judicially visible; and growth generated the fiscal room that the framers in 1950 did not have.
• The paradox resolves neatly. Non-justiciability was justified in 1950 by want of resources; when resources grew, the directives were converted into justiciable statutory rights. Liberalisation supplied the very condition on which Part IV’s deferral had rested.

The decade in which the state withdrew from production was also the decade in which it legislated the largest welfare guarantees in its history.

What the record still indicts

• Growth has not delivered employment at the same rate. Successive labour-force data show heavy reliance on self-employment and unpaid family work, a post-2019 movement of workers back into agriculture, and stagnant real wages — an outcome Article 41’s right to work was meant to prevent.
• Inequality has widened to a historic extreme. Work by the World Inequality Lab published in 2024 places the top one per cent’s share at roughly 22.6 per cent of income and 40.1 per cent of wealth by 2022-23 — the highest recorded since 1922, and a direct rebuke to Articles 38(2) and 39(c).
• Withdrawal of the state has been sharpest where Part IV is most specific. Private provision dominates health and higher education; contractualisation has grown; out-of-pocket health spending remains a leading cause of impoverishment.
• Formal entitlement outruns actual delivery. A hundred-day guarantee that averages fifty days, and a right to education that secures enrolment without learning, show that statutory conversion is necessary but not sufficient.

The constructive answer

• Where markets dominate, Part IV becomes the constitutional statement of what markets will not supply — a living wage, universal schooling, clean air, care in old age. Its relevance rises exactly as the state’s direct economic role falls.
• It also supplies the yardstick for regulating private power. Whether a restriction on trade or property is a reasonable restriction under Article 19 is judged against the objectives in Part IV, which is precisely the terrain of a market economy.
• The question is demonstrably live rather than historical. In November 2024 a nine-judge bench spent an entire judgment on what Article 39(b) means for privately owned property — an argument that would be pointless if the Part had become decorative.

Fundamental Duties: Part IVA

Origin

• Part IVA and Article 51A were inserted by the 42nd Amendment (1976) on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee, appointed by the Congress in 1976 during the Emergency.
• The model was Soviet constitutional practice. The constitutions of the USSR, and later of China and Japan, paired charters of rights with charters of duties; most liberal constitutions carry no duties chapter at all.
• The Committee proposed eight duties; Parliament enacted ten. An eleventh was added by the 86th Amendment (2002) alongside Article 21A.
• The insertion also answered a claim of Indian tradition — that duty, dharma, precedes right — and aligns with Article 29(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone has duties to the community in which alone free and full development of personality is possible.

The eleven duties

• It shall be the duty of every citizen of India:
  • (a) to abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem;
  • (b) to cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired the national struggle for freedom;
  • (c) to uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India;
  • (d) to defend the country and render national service when called upon to do so;
  • (e) to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities, and to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women;
  • (f) to value and preserve the rich heritage of the country’s composite culture;
  • (g) to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures;
  • (h) to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform;
  • (i) to safeguard public property and to abjure violence;
  • (j) to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity;
  • (k) to provide opportunities for education to one’s child or ward between the ages of six and fourteen — added by the 86th Amendment, 2002.

What the Committee recommended and Parliament refused

• Penalties for non-compliance. The Committee proposed that Parliament prescribe punishment for failure to observe a duty. This was not enacted, and no penalty attaches to Article 51A.
• A bar on judicial questioning. It proposed that any law imposing such a penalty should not be open to challenge for infringing a fundamental right. This too was dropped, and its rejection matters — it is the difference between a duties chapter and an instrument for suspending rights.
• A duty to pay taxes. Recommended and not included, which is why the omission is a fair criticism of Parliament rather than of the Committee.

Legal status and threefold effect

• The duties are not enforceable by any court and carry no sanction. As D. D. Basu observed, their legal utility resembles that of the Directives as they stood in 1950 — addressed to a party, unsupported by a remedy.
• First, they are a reminder of correlativity. Rights and duties are not merely reconcilable but inseparable; a right to life implies a duty not to injure, and a right to freedom implies a duty to sustain the conditions of freedom for others.
• Second, they are an interpretive aid, and this is where their real work has been done. A law giving effect to a duty is more readily upheld as reasonable when tested against Article 19 or Article 14.
  • Mohan Kumar Singhania v. Union of India (1992) upheld a government training programme by reference to the duty in 51A(j) to strive towards excellence.
  • AIIMS Students Union v. AIIMS (2002) held that fundamental duties, though not enforceable by writ, are relevant in construing constitutional and statutory provisions, and used 51A(j) in striking down institutional reservation in postgraduate medical admissions.
  • M. C. Mehta v. Union of India used 51A(g) to direct compulsory environmental education in schools and its diffusion through cinema, radio and television — a duty converted into an executive obligation.
  • Mirzapur Moti Kureshi (2005) read 51A(g) with Article 48 to sustain a total slaughter ban.
• Third, they operate as a warning. They put citizens on notice of conduct that may attract legislative restriction — a signal, not a sanction.
• Justice Venkataramiah’s observation sharpens the point: the Constitution nowhere declares the duties non-justiciable, and given the words fundamental and duties, the question of their enforceability was never as settled as textbooks assume.

A duty that carries no penalty still changes what a court is willing to call reasonable.

The Verma Committee and what already enforces the duties

• The Justice J. S. Verma Committee (1999) was appointed to recommend how fundamental duties might be operationalised, and its central finding was that several are already enforced by existing law.
• The statutes it identified include the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act 1971 for duty (a); the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955 for duty (e); the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967 for duties (c) and (e); the Representation of the People Act 1951, which disqualifies for corrupt practices including appeals to religion; and the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 and Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 for duty (g).
• Its wider recommendation was educational — that awareness of constitutional obligation be built through schooling and public campaigns, since a citizenry conscious of its duties is a precondition of social advancement and political progress.
• Ranganath Mishra v. Union of India (2003) brought the report before the Supreme Court, which accepted it and directed the Union to take steps for its implementation, including measures to generate consciousness of the duties.
• The Court has since declined to go further. In Durga Dutt v. Union of India, heard on 11 September 2024, a bench led by Justice Sanjiv Khanna refused to direct Parliament to enact a law enforcing Article 51A, holding that the Court cannot compel legislation and that consciousness of duty is for citizens to develop — while asking the Attorney General to compile the existing statutes that already give effect to each clause.

The criticisms, answered

Criticism	The substance of it	The answer
A socialist graft	Duties charters belong to Soviet-style constitutions; a liberal constitution exists to limit government, not instruct citizens	True as to origin, but Part III already carries horizontal duties in Articles 15(2), 17, 23 and 24; the Constitution was never purely negative
Vague and moralistic	“Noble ideals”, “scientific temper”, “composite culture” are not legal standards	Fair. Their function is interpretive and educative, and vagueness is fatal only to a provision meant to be enforced
Obvious omissions	No duty to vote, to pay taxes or to practise family planning	Fair, and the tax omission is Parliament’s doing; the list is a political compromise, not a considered civic code
Emergency provenance	Inserted in 1976 by a government seeking to justify restriction	The provenance is real, but the coercive limbs were dropped, and the 44th Amendment left Part IVA untouched — including by the government that undid the rest of the 42nd
Non-enforceable, hence exhortation	No penalty, no remedy, no consequence	Non-enforceable does not mean inert: the duties have altered outcomes in AIIMS, M. C. Mehta and Mirzapur Moti Kureshi
No measurable change in behaviour	Fifty years on, no evidence that citizens behave differently	The strongest criticism, and largely unanswerable on the evidence; the honest defence is that no constitutional provision changes conduct by itself

Can a constitutional statement generate civic responsibility?

• A constitution shapes the vocabulary of public argument even where it creates no remedy. Article 51A supplies the language in which claims about environment, public property, women’s dignity and pluralism are made, and that vocabulary is itself a civic resource.
• The comparative position cuts both ways. Japan, China and the erstwhile USSR carry duties in their constitutions; most liberal democracies — the United States, Australia, Canada — do not, and are not conspicuously less civic, which suggests civic responsibility is produced by schooling, association and enforcement of ordinary law rather than by constitutional declaration.
• Duties are addressed to citizens in government too, not only to citizens against government. Officials lecturing the public on duty while ignoring their own invite the charge of hypocrisy, and the Verma Committee’s emphasis on conduct in public life reflects exactly that concern.
• The current push is educative rather than coercive — Constitution Day observances, curriculum inclusion under the National Education Policy 2020, and awareness campaigns. Whether that produces civic responsibility is unproven; that it is the only constitutionally available route is not seriously contested.

Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles: Core and Conscience

The ideological and legal difference

	Part III — Fundamental Rights	Part IV — Directive Principles
Philosophy	Liberal, individualist	Socialist and Gandhian, society-regarding
Form	Largely negative — restrains the state	Positive — commands the state to act
Beneficiary	The individual, including non-citizens for several rights	The community; addressed to the State alone
Equality secured	Formal equality before law	Substantive equality of condition
Legal status	Justiciable; enforceable under Articles 32 and 226	Non-justiciable by force of Article 37
Democracy served	Political democracy	Economic and social democracy
Origin	Bill of Rights tradition, United States	Irish Constitution 1937, Spanish text of 1931
Requires for realisation	Restraint by the state	Resources and legislation

• Austin’s insight is that the columns are misleading. Parts III and IV are, in his account, a seamless web — the conscience of the Constitution — because both serve the same social revolution by different instruments.
• Ambedkar’s framing was similar: the Directives set the objective, the Rights set the manner in which it may be pursued.

The doctrinal sequence

Stage	Holding or effect
Champakam Dorairajan (1951)	Fundamental Rights prevail; the Directives must conform to and run subsidiary to Part III. Communal reservation order struck down
First Amendment (1951)	Inserted 15(4), 31A, 31B and the Ninth Schedule to protect reservation and land reform from Part III challenge
Sajjan Singh (1965)	Upheld Parliament’s power to amend any part including Part III; the first judicial hint of a core of basic features
Golak Nath (1967)	Parliament cannot amend Fundamental Rights at all, giving Part III the higher status
24th and 25th Amendments (1971)	Restored the amending power; Article 31C shielded laws giving effect to 39(b) and (c) from Articles 14, 19 and 31, and barred any court from questioning such a declaration
Kesavananda Bharati (1973)	Parliament may amend any provision but not destroy the basic structure; the bar on judicial review in Article 31C struck down, the rest upheld
42nd Amendment (1976)	Section 4 extended Article 31C to laws implementing all or any of the Directive Principles
Minerva Mills (1980)	That extension struck down; balance between Parts III and IV declared part of the basic structure
Waman Rao (1981)	Ninth Schedule laws added before 24 April 1973 immune; those added later open to challenge; unamended 31C upheld
Unni Krishnan (1993)	The interpretive-harmony phase: Part IV used to give content to Part III, and education read into Article 21
I. R. Coelho (2007)	Ninth Schedule laws enacted after 24 April 1973 subject to basic-structure review on the rights test

Minerva Mills as the settled position

“The Indian Constitution is founded on the bedrock of the balance between Parts III and IV. To give absolute primacy to one over the other is to disturb the harmony of the Constitution.” — Supreme Court, Minerva Mills v. Union of India (1980)

• The Court’s second formulation is the operative one: the goals set out in Part IV are to be achieved without abrogating the means provided by Part III.
• The reasoning is structural, not sentimental. An unlimited Article 31C would let Parliament immunise any law by reciting a directive, which would make Part III defeasible at will and destroy the very thing basic-structure review exists to protect.
• Note what survived. Only Section 4 of the 42nd Amendment fell; the unamended Article 31C, shielding laws that genuinely implement 39(b) and (c), was left standing — a point that lay dormant for four decades before becoming decisive in 2024.

Are the Directive Principles “more fundamental”?

• The case for Part IV. Article 37 alone calls its provisions fundamental in the governance of the country, a phrase used of no fundamental right; the Preamble’s promise of social and economic justice is spelt out in Articles 38, 39, 41, 43 and 46 rather than in Part III; rights protect an existing distribution while principles seek to change it; and Ambedkar treated Part IV as the novel feature of the Constitution.
• The case against. Enforceability is what distinguishes a right from an aspiration. Only Part III is justiciable, only Part III is guarded by Article 32, and only Part III constrains a majority. History supports the caution: the expansion of Article 31C turned the promise of social justice into a licence to escape review, which is why Minerva Mills struck it down.
• The settled answer is balance. The question contains a false hierarchy. Part IV supplies the ends the Preamble names; Part III supplies the means and the limits of pursuing them. Wherever either has been treated as superior, the Court has corrected it.

Part IV has done its most effective work through Part III

• The non-justiciable half has been enforced through the justiciable half. This is the single most important development in the relationship and it is easy to miss.
• Livelihood entered the Constitution through Olga Tellis (1985), reading Article 21 in the light of Article 39(a); education through Unni Krishnan (1993), reading it with Articles 41, 45 and 46; a clean environment through Subhash Kumar (1991), reading it with Article 48A; legal aid through Hussainara Khatoon (1979), reading it with Article 39A; health through the industrial-health cases reading it with Articles 42 and 47.
• The mechanism was public interest litigation, which relaxed locus standi from the late 1970s and allowed claims to reach the Court on behalf of people who could never have filed them.
• The consequence is a reversal of the original design. A Part deliberately kept out of the courts is now routinely enforced by them — not directly under Article 37, but as the content of Article 21.

Part IV has been enforced not against Part III but through it, the non-justiciable half carried into court as the meaning of Article 21.

K. C. Markandan: the conflict is an artefact of interpretation

• Markandan argues that the celebrated conflict between Parts III and IV is artificial — a construction of the judiciary rather than a feature of the design.
• His first argument is from the framers’ own conduct. If the clash were as obvious as later courts assumed, why would the Assembly have placed a fundamental right to property in Part III and, on the facing page, a directive requiring material resources to be distributed for the common good? Framers do not knowingly draft a contradiction into consecutive chapters.
• His second argument is from the drafting history. Parts III and IV originally belonged to a single list, and were separated on a practical test alone — whether an entitlement could be assured to the citizen and therefore enforced, or could not and therefore had to be stated as a direction. The division marks feasibility, not opposition.
• His third argument concerns the expected judicial role. The Assembly assumed that when the state acted to implement a directive, the judiciary would allow the government to discharge a constitutional function rather than assert Part III against it. The three organs were to work together, and the courts were to enforce rights so far as that did not obstruct the directives.
• His conclusion is an indictment. The framers saw no incongruity and no possibility of conflict between Parts III and IV; Indian courts read one in, contrary to the intention of the founders, and the amendment-and-litigation cycle from Champakam to Minerva Mills is the cost of that misreading.
• He also endorses the primacy claim on a distinct ground: the Directives concern the rights of society as a whole, the Rights only those of the individual, and the former is the larger interest.
• The position is contestable but valuable. It explains why the quarrel took the shape of repeated constitutional amendment — Parliament kept insisting that it was performing a constitutional duty, not evading one, and each amendment was a restatement of Markandan’s premise in legislative form.

The Gandhian and liberal schools, and the way out

• The Gandhian school holds that Part IV embodies the socio-economic justice Gandhi stood for and must have priority, since a formally free citizen who is landless, illiterate and hungry is not free in any sense that matters.
• The liberal school answers that Fundamental Rights are the core of democratic freedom, that they exist precisely to be asserted against a state acting in the name of collective good, and that history furnishes ample examples of welfare invoked to justify repression.
• The judicial way out has been harmonious construction — read the two together, prefer the interpretation that gives effect to both, and treat neither as absolute.
• The legislative way out remains available. Parliament may enact laws and amend the Constitution to clarify the relationship, subject to the basic-structure limit that Minerva Mills placed on exactly that power.

A note on the right to property

• Property was originally a fundamental right. Article 19(1)(f) guaranteed the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property, and Article 31 protected against compulsory acquisition except for a public purpose and on payment of compensation.
• It was the fault line of the whole conflict. Land reform under Articles 39(b) and (c) collided with Article 31 in case after case, and the First, Fourth, Seventeenth, Twenty-fifth and Forty-second Amendments were all, in substance, attempts to move that boundary.
• The 44th Amendment (1978) resolved it by deletion. Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31 were repealed, and property became a constitutional and legal right under Article 300A — no person to be deprived of property save by authority of law.
• The change removed the remedy, not the protection. Article 300A is enforceable through Article 226 but not through Article 32, and the Supreme Court has continued to insist on procedural fairness in acquisition — but the most contested item in the Part III–Part IV quarrel had been taken out of Part III altogether.

Property Owners Association (2024): The Quarrel Reopened

• A nine-judge bench decided Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra on 5 November 2024, the largest bench to sit on Part IV since Kesavananda, arising from a Maharashtra law permitting acquisition of dilapidated buildings.
• The narrowing of Article 39(b). By 8:1, the Court held that not every privately owned resource is a material resource of the community. Whether it qualifies is decided by a context-specific enquiry — the nature and characteristics of the resource, its impact on community welfare, its scarcity, and the consequences of its concentration in private hands.
• Krishna Iyer’s view was rejected as doctrinal error. His minority opinion in Ranganatha Reddy (1977) had held that all resources meeting material needs fall within 39(b); the majority, speaking through Chandrachud CJI, treated that as an attempt to write a rigid economic theory into a constitution that is deliberately economically neutral.
• Sanjeev Coke (1983) was overruled. A five-judge bench had adopted Krishna Iyer’s non-binding minority view in preference to the binding majority in the same case — an act the Court now described as judicial indiscipline.
• On Article 31C the bench was unanimous. Since Minerva Mills invalidated Section 4 of the 42nd Amendment, the unamended Article 31C as upheld in Kesavananda revives and remains in the Constitution — protection for laws implementing 39(b) and (c) alone, and subject to judicial review of whether the law genuinely does so.
• The separate opinions matter. Nagarathna J. partly dissented, holding that private property can become a community resource through nationalisation, acquisition or donation, and objecting to the majority’s suggestion that earlier judges had been untrue to their oath. Dhulia J. dissented outright, defending Krishna Iyer’s approach as grounded in humanist principles.
• The significance for Part IV is double-edged. The judgment confirms that Article 31C is alive, so the Part III–Part IV accommodation is still operative law; but by narrowing 39(b) it contracts the redistributive reach of the very directive that once justified nationalisation, aligning constitutional doctrine with a market economy.

Constitutional Protection of the Environment

The textual base

• Article 48A, inserted in 1976, directs the state to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard forests and wildlife; Article 51A(g), inserted by the same amendment, casts the corresponding duty on the citizen.
• The 42nd Amendment also moved forests and wildlife to the Concurrent List, giving the Union the legislative competence that Article 48A presupposes.
• Article 253 supplied the route around federal limits. The Water Act 1974 and Air Act 1981 were enacted to implement the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, and the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 followed the Bhopal disaster on the same footing.

The Article 21 route

• Neither Article 48A nor 51A(g) is enforceable, so the operative right came from Article 21. Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar (1991) held that the right to life includes the right to pollution-free water and air.
• Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (1985), on limestone quarrying in the Doon valley, was the first environmental public interest litigation and established that ecological damage could be restrained at the instance of a stranger to the dispute.
• The M. C. Mehta line built the field — absolute liability for hazardous industry after the Oleum gas leak, the Ganga pollution and tanneries cases, the Taj Trapezium directions, the shift of Delhi’s public transport to CNG, and the direction for compulsory environmental education under 51A(g).
• Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum v. Union of India (1996) absorbed the precautionary principle and polluter pays into Indian law as part of sustainable development; M. C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath (1997) imported the public trust doctrine, holding that air, water, forests and ecologically fragile land are held by the state as trustee for the public.
• M. K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024), arising from transmission lines through Great Indian Bustard habitat, recognised a right against the adverse effects of climate change under Articles 14 and 21, read expressly with Articles 48A and 51A(g) — the clearest recent demonstration of the interpretive route.

Institutions and their limits

• The National Green Tribunal, created by the NGT Act 2010, gave environmental adjudication a specialist forum with power to award compensation and restitution — but suffers vacancies, uneven regional bench coverage, and frequent appeals that dilute its orders.
• Enforcement remains the weak point. Pollution control boards are under-staffed and under-funded, and compliance monitoring is thin relative to the volume of regulation.

The dilution critique

• The draft EIA Notification of 2020 was criticised for shortening public consultation, exempting large classes of project from prior clearance, and legitimising post-facto clearance.
• The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act 2023 narrowed the statute’s application to land formally recorded as forest, and exempted land within 100 km of international borders for strategic projects, up to 0.10 hectare for roadside connectivity and 10 hectares for security infrastructure, besides permitting zoos, safaris and ecotourism on forest land.
  • In February 2024, in Ashok Kumar Sharma v. Union of India, the Supreme Court directed states to continue applying the broad dictionary meaning of “forest” laid down in T. N. Godavarman (1996), including deemed forests, pending final decision — restoring by interim order what the amendment had narrowed by statute.
• The post-facto clearance question has swung twice. Vanashakti v. Union of India (16 May 2025) quashed the 2017 notification and the 2021 standard operating procedure, holding retrospective environmental clearance alien to environmental jurisprudence. On 18 November 2025 a three-judge bench led by Gavai CJI recalled that judgment as per incuriam and held ex post facto clearance permissible in exceptional cases where pollution norms are met, applying proportionality and polluter pays.
• The pattern is the recurring one. A dense constitutional and statutory architecture coexists with executive dilution and judicial oscillation, so that the protection actually available depends less on Article 48A than on who is litigating and when.

Conclusion

• The framers separated Parts III and IV on a test of feasibility and were then read as having created a hierarchy. Three decades of amendment and litigation went into undoing that reading, and Minerva Mills settled it at balance rather than at primacy either way.
• The directives have been neither pious declarations nor self-executing commands. They have been converted into statutes — food, education, employment, legal aid, environment — and interpreted into Article 21 where legislation lagged, which is a substantial record for a chapter that no court may enforce.
• The failures are equally specific: Article 43A untouched, Article 44 unimplemented nationally for seventy-five years, ceiling redistribution defeated, and inequality at its widest since 1922 despite Articles 38(2) and 39(c).
• Part IVA remains the weakest of the three chapters, valuable as an interpretive aid and as constitutional vocabulary, unproven as a generator of civic conduct, and constitutionally safe only because the coercive limbs the Swaran Singh Committee proposed were left out.
• The live question is no longer which Part prevails but how much redistributive room Part IV still commands — which is precisely what a nine-judge bench narrowed in 2024, and why the chapter is anything but decorative.