Administrative Law

Hamdard Dawakhana v. Union of India

AIR 1960 SC 554

Facts

Hamdard Dawakhana challenged the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954.
The Act restricted advertisements of drugs claiming to cure certain serious diseases.
Section 3(d) also allowed the Government to add “any other disease or condition” through rules.
Hamdard argued that this gave uncontrolled power to the executive.

Whether Section 3(d), allowing the Government to specify any other disease by rules, amounted to excessive delegation.

The legislature may delegate details to the executive.
But it must first lay down a clear policy, standard or guideline.
Delegation becomes invalid when the executive gets unguided power to decide the scope of the law.

The Court first distinguished conditional legislation and delegated legislation.
Conditional legislation means the legislature has already made a complete law, and the executive only decides when, where, or to whom it applies.
Delegated legislation means the executive fills in details through rules, but only within limits fixed by the legislature.
Here, Section 3(d) did not merely ask the executive to apply a completed law to a fixed situation.
It allowed the Government to decide what new diseases or conditions would fall within the prohibition.
The problem was that the Act gave no test for choosing those diseases.
It did not say whether the disease had to be serious, contagious, incurable, dangerous for self-medication, or harmful to public health.
So the executive could expand the prohibition without any legislative guidance.
The Court accepted that the Act had a general public-health purpose: preventing harmful self-medication caused by misleading drug advertisements.
But that broad purpose was not enough to control the specific power under Section 3(d).
Since no criteria or standards were given, the power became uncanalised and uncontrolled.
MP Jain also explains this case as one where power to include more diseases was invalid because the Act did not state what facts or circumstances should guide inclusion.

The Supreme Court held that the words allowing the Government to specify “any other disease or condition”were ultra vires.
The Schedule to the Rules based on that power also became invalid.
But the rest of Section 3 and the Act survived because the invalid portion was severable.
Use this case for: delegation is invalid when the legislature gives the executive power to expand the law without standards, policy, or limits.