The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave the Centre one more chance to amend the Competition Commission Act to make it constitutionally valid.
Despite two days of persuasion, the government could not convince the Bench headed by Chief Justice R C Lahoti that the present law was properly conceived.
The court had given several chances to the government in the past one-year to change the offending provisions. But the government had come up with half-baked and unconvincing changes. The main objection was the primacy given to bureaucrats and the secondary role awarded to the judiciary.
Even in the latest affidavit filed by the government, it insisted that the Competition Commission was an expert body where the judiciary's role would only be that of experts.
When government counsel Vivek Thanka resumed his arguments for the second day today, the judges wanted the government to take convincing steps to bring the law within the ambit of the Constitution.
Therefore, they gave three weeks to the government to make specific changes in the law. The former Chief Justice and the present one had made several caustic remarks against the law as it stood now.
When the government counsel submitted that experts on market economy would know better about the issues before the commission, the judges remarked that in that case the police commissioner could be asked to act as sessions judges as they were experts in criminal investigation.
The counsel compared similar laws in other countries and stated that the commission was a regulatory body like the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India or Securities and Exchange Board of India, which were created through similar legislation.
Thanka pointed out that most cases were initiated on their own (suo motu) by the commission as economic experts understood the manipulations of the markets much better. The commission did not receive complaints and petitions like an ordinary court.
Many of the issues were brought before it by whistle-blowers who wanted to be anonymous. The government also stressed the urgency of establishing the commission soon as a new global economic regime would come into force in January 2005.