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17. When the material words in a statute are capable of bearing two or more considerations, the most firmly established rule for construction of such words is the rule in Heydon's case (1584) Co. Rep. 7a, P 7b = 76 ER 637 which has now attained the status of a classic described by the Supreme Court in the case of Kanailal Sur v. Paramnidhi Sadhukhan - AIR 1957 SC 307. In the case of Anderton v. Ryan - 1985 (2) All. ER 355, it was held that the rule in Heydon's (supra) case which is also known as "purposive construction" or "mischief rule", enables consideration of four matters in construing an Act : (i) what was the law before the making of the Act; (ii) what was the mischief or defect for which the law did not provide; (Hi) what is the remedy that the Act has provided, and (iv) what is the reason of the remedy. The rule then directs that the Courts must adopt that construction which shall suppress the mischief and advance the remedy. K. LLEWELLYN, in his article, 'Remarks on the Theory of Appellate Decision and the Rules or Canons About How Statutes Are to be Construed', speaking on the necessity of legislative purpose to legislative interpretation, has said, 'If a statute is to make sense, it must be read in the light of some assumed purpose. A statute merely declaring a rule, with no purpose or objective, is nonsense'. MART and SACKS have inquired whether it is not true that, 'the meaning of a statute is never plain unless it fits with some intelligible purpose'.

"It was to cure this mischief of multiple taxation and to preserve the free flow of inter-State trade or commerce in the Union of India regarded as one economic unit without any provincial barrier that the Constitution-makers adopted Article 286 in the Constitution".

The rule was again applied by the Supreme Court in similar context while construing the changes brought about by the Constitution 46th Amendment Act in Goodyear India Ltd. v. State of Haryana - .

19. As per the rule of "purposive construction", the Parliament is presumed to intend that in construing an Act the Court, by advancing the remedy which is indicated by the words of the Act for the mischief being dealt with, and the implications arising from those words, should aim to further every aspect of the legislative purpose, construction which promotes the remedy Legislature has provided to cure a particular mischief. In Section 304 of Statutory Interpretation by FRANCIS BENNION dealing with nature of purposive construction, it is stated :

"When Judges speak of a purposive construction, they usually mean to refer to what this Code calls a purposive - and strained construction. Thus we find STAUGHTON, J., referring to the 'power of the Courts to disregard the literal meaning or an Act and to give it a purposive construction, A-G of Newzealand v. Ortiz, (1982) QB 349. Lord DIPLOCK spoke of 'competing approaches to the task of statutory construction -- the literal and the purposive approach' Kammins Ballrooms Co. Ltd. v. Zenith Investments (Torquay) Ltd., (1971) AC 850. Nevertheless a purposive construction must obviously be in all cases a construction which gives effect to the legislative intention, whether or not the statutory language needs to be strained to achieve this. Most often a purposive construction, in the true sense, will be a literal construction".

In Carter v. Bradbeer, 1975 (1) WLR 1204, Lord DIPLOCK observed that 'if one looks back to the actual decisions of the House of Lords on questions of statutory construction over the last 30 years one cannot fail to be struck by the evidence of a trend away from the purely literal towards the purposive construction of statutory provisions'. The matter was summed up by Lord DIPLOCK in this way -"........I am not reluctant to adopt a purposive construction where to apply the literal meaning of the legislative language used would lead to results which would clearly defeat the purposes of the Act. But in doing so the task on which a Court of Justice is engaged remains one of construction, even where this involves reading into the Act words which are not expressly included in it. Kammins Ballrooms Co. Ltd. v. Zenith Investments (Torquay) Ltd., (1971) AC 850 provides in instance of this; but in that case the three conditions that must be fulfilled in order to justify this course were satisfied. First, it was possible to determine from a consideration of the provisions of the Act read as a whole precisely what the mischief was that it was the purpose of the Act to remedy; secondly, it was apparent that the draftsman and Parliament had by inadvertence overlooked, and so omitted to deal with, an eventuality that required to be dealt with if the purpose of the Act was to be achieved; and thirdly, it was possible to state with certainty what were the additional words that would have been inserted by the draftsman and approved by Parliament had their attention been drawn to the omission before the Bill passed into law. Unless this third condition is fulfilled any attempt by a Court of Justice to repair the omission in the Act cannot be justified as an exercise of its jurisdiction to determine what is the meaning of a written law which Parliament has passed" Jones v. Wortham Park Settled Estates, (1980) AC 74."