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P. G. Gokhale, P. H. Parekh, Manju Sharma, Kailash Vasdev & C. B. Singh for the respondent in SLP No. 3359. The, following Judgments were delivered BEG, C.J. I am in general agreement with the line of thinking adopted and the conclusions reached by my learned brother Krishna lyer. I would, however, like to add my reasons for this agreement and to indicate my approach to a problem where relevant legislation leaves so much for determination by the Court as to enable us to perform a function very akin to legislation.

The great American judge, Justice Cardozo, while he was Chief Justice of New York Supreme Court., made this point:

"The Courts are not helped as they could and ought to be in the adaptation of law to justice. The reason they are not helped is because there is no one whose business it is to give warning that help is needed. .. . . . . We must have a courier who will carry the tidings of distress........ Today courts and legislative work in separation and aloofness. The penalty is paid both in the wasted effort of production and in the lowered quality of the product. On the one side, the judges, left to fight against anachronism and injustice by the methods of judge-made law, are distracted by the conflicting promptings of justice and logic, of consistency and mercy, and the output of their labors bears the tokens of the strain. On the other side, the legislature, informed only casually and intermittently of the needs and problems of the courts, without expert or responsible or disinterested or systematic advice as to the workings of one rule or another, patches the fabric here and there, and mars often when it would mend. Legislature and courts move ,on in proud and silent isolation. Some agency must be found to mediate between them."

The grave disquiet about arrears in courts must be accompanied by deeper insights into newer methodology than collection of, statistics and minor reforms. Appreciating the urgency of quick justice a component of social justice, as a priority item on the agenda of Law Reforms and suspecting public unawareness of some essential aspects of the problem, we make these painful observations. This obiter exercise is in discharge of the court's obligation to inform the community in our developing country where to look for the faults in the legal order and how to take meaningful corrective measures. The courts too have a constituency the nation-and a manifesto-the Constitution. That is the validation of this ,divagation. Back to the single problem of thorny simplicity : what is an 'industry' ? Historically speaking, this Indian statute has its beginnings in Australia, even as the bulk of our corpus juris, with a colonial favour, is a carbon copy of English law. Therefore, in interpretation, we may seek light Australasially, and so it is that the precedents of this- court have drawn on Australian cases as on English dictionaries. But India is India and its individuality, in law and society, is attested by its National Charter, so that statutory construction must be home-spun even if hospitable to alien thinking.

"Education seeks to build up the personality of the pupil by assisting his physical, intellectual, moral and emotional development. To speak of this educational process in terms of industry sounds so. completely incongruous that one is not surprised that the Act has deliberately so defined workmen under S. 2(s) as to exclude teachers from its scope. Under the sense of values recognised both by the traditional and conservative as well as the modern and progressive social outlook, teaching and teachers are, no doubt, assigned a high place of honour and it is obviously necessary and desirable that teaching and teachers should receive the respect that is due to them. A proper sense of values would naturally hold teaching and teachers in high esteem, though power or wealth may not be associated with them. It cannot be denied that the concept of social justice is wide enough to include teaching and teachers, and the requirement that teachers should receive proper emoluments and other amenities which is essentially based on social justice cannot be disputed; but the effect of excluding teachers 'from s. 2(s) is only this that the remedy available for the betterment of their financial prospects does not fall under the Act. It is well known that Education Departments of the State Governments as well as the Union Government, and the University Grants Commission carefully consider this problem and assist the teachers by requiring the payment to them of proper scales of pay and by insisting on the fixation of other reasonable terms and conditions of service in regard to teachers engaged in primary and secondary education and collegiate education which fall under their respective jurisdic- tions. The position nevertheless is clear that any problems connected with teachers and their salaries are outside the purview of the Act, and since the teachers form the sole class employees with whose co-operation education is imparted by educational institutions, their exclusion from the purview of the Act necessarily corroborates the conclusion that education itself is not without its scope."