Court caseAIR 1962 SC 305

The Newspaper (Price and Page) Act 1956 empowered the Central Government to regulate the price of newspapers in relation to their pages and the space for advertisements. The Daily Newspaper (Price and Page) Order 1960 fixed a schedule: a paper of a given number of pages had to be sold at not less than the prescribed price. 'Sakal', a Marathi daily from Pune, would have had to raise its price or cut its pages, either of which would reduce its circulation. It challenged the Act and Order.

Mudholkar J held the Act and Order void. Freedom of speech and expression includes the right to publish and circulate one's ideas, opinions and views, and the right to propagate them to as wide an audience as one chooses. The schedule directly affected circulation, since raising the price would lose readers and reducing pages would curtail content; it therefore directly abridged Article 19(1)(a). The government's argument that the measure regulated the business side of newspapers and so was a reasonable restriction on 19(1)(g) in the interests of the general public was rejected: the State cannot curtail the freedom of speech by invoking the grounds of clause (6). The right to freedom of speech cannot be restricted for the purpose of regulating the commercial aspect of a newspaper, nor to help other newspapers.