In this context, the NAPM, the NACEJ and the AIRF have stated that they see the recent case registered by CBI against Ms. Bhanu Tatak, as part of a series of repressive measures by the Government over years, to quell democratic resistance by the indigenous communities and farmers. The FIR by CBI against Bhanu, which alleges violations of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 (FCRA), state the NAPM and NACEJ, “is a means of intimidating, discrediting and weakening a peaceful people’s movement.” The nationwide forums have saluted the Siang Indigenous Farmers Forum Youth Wing (SIFFYW) that has resolutely stood with Bhanu, in the face of intimidation and divisive tactics of the Government, calling her true daughter of the Abor land. 

Instead of dialoguing with the local communities and wider Siang people’s movement, it is unjustifiable that an FCRA investigation has been instituted as an instrument of intimidation against Ms. Bhanu Tatak, a young woman indigenous leader, reads the detailed statement. “The timing and circumstances of this FIR are particularly troubling because they come amidst intensified efforts to advance surveys and pre-feasibility activities for the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP), in the backdrop of sustained opposition from affected communities.”

Most crucially, the networks of people’s organisations have emphasised that a democratic people’s movement cannot be treated as a ‘security problem’ by the government.  In this context, the much criticised “FCRA is being increasingly weaponised to intimidate people’s organizations and harass their leaders. It is in fact the free flow of foreign funding for toxic infrastructure projects enabled by the Government (for ex. the disastrous SHANTI Act to privatize nuclear power generation) that poses a major risk to the people and environment in India. It is such decisions of the Government that need to be strongly questioned.”

Background: A retrospective amendment to the FCRA Act, 2010 through the Finance Bill, 2016, validated the foreign funds received by political parties after September 26, 2010. To avoid scrutiny before this date, the Government introduced another amendment in the Finance Act, 2018 to cover the period beginning August 5, 1976 – the date the original FCRA law came into existence. These amendments were done to counter a landmark judgement of the Delhi High Court in 2014, in a case filed by EAS Sarma and the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR). The judgement found that the BJP and INC had taken donations from Vedanta & its subsidiaries, registered in England and Wales. 

The central question that people’s movements are asking today is: When a political party illegally takes foreign funds from corporates, is found guilty, amends the law to legalize its actions, and then weaponizes the FCRA to intimidate people’s movements, which are legitimately and democratically protesting the terrible environmental and social cost of ill-conceived projects, which only benefit corporates in the name of ‘development’, who is actually guilty of taking foreign funds to harm the interests of the country?

For years, communities of the Siang valley have raised fundamental objections to mega-dam construction. The proposed SUMP – described as a 12,500 MW project in recent reporting, would have profound implications for ancestral settlements, forests, agricultural land, riverine ecosystems and the cultural landscape of the indigenous Adi people. The opposition to these projects is neither ‘sudden’ nor an ‘externally manufactured phenomenon’. Resistance to large dams in the Siang basin has a history stretching back decades. Academic research published in 2025-26 documents the long-standing conflict between state-led hydropower development and indigenous communities in the valley.

The communities have repeatedly been at the forefront of the opposition. In 2025, villagers and the SIFF protested the deployment of Central Armed Police Forces in and around areas where SUMP-related pre-feasibility activities were being undertaken. Reports documented the presence of armed forces in multiple villages like Beging, Geku, Yingkiong and Boleng, while project-affected communities demanded their withdrawal. In September 2026, SIFF again publicly objected to the deployment of security forces for SUMP-related PFR activities and reported that project-affected families were demanding both the withdrawal of security forces from the villages and reversal of actions against community-level representatives.

Outlining in detail this background to how state power and the deliberate weaponisation of the FCRA law is being used to criminalise legitimate citizen’s protests, interventions and activity, the NAPM, the NACEJ and the AIRF have given detailed reasons for the reasoning behind this statement.

“Villages inhabited by citizens of India should not become militarized spaces simply because their inhabitants oppose a harmful “development” project. The presence of armed personnel around communities resisting a dam creates an unmistakable atmosphere of coercion. It risks transforming a question of democratic consent, indigenous rights, ecological protection and displacement into a question of law-and-order and national security. That is a completely wrong and unconstitutional approach.

“The Siang is not an ‘empty valley’.  For the Adi people, the Siang is not merely a water resource waiting to be converted into electricity. The river, forests, mountains and agricultural landscapes constitute an interconnected living cultural and ecological system. The Adi community has described the Siang as ‘Ane Siang‘ – the sacred river. The Adi Bane Kebang has also demanded the scrapping of SUMP and withdrawal of the Central Armed Police Forces deployed for project-related activities.

“Project-affected communities have repeatedly raised concerns over displacement, loss of ancestral land, destruction of forests, disruption of livelihoods and damage to cultural identity. Independent research also records the profound importance of these territories to indigenous agro-ecological systems and cultural continuity.

“Reports have also documented opposition to other mega-dam projects across Arunachal Pradesh, including projects in the Dibang and Siang/Siyom river systems. The experience of the Dibang Multipurpose Project, where indigenous communities have long resisted the project because of its implications for forests, land and livelihoods, should be a warning against repeating the same model of ‘development’ elsewhere.

“Consent cannot be replaced by force. We strongly reject the proposition that ‘development’ can be secured by deploying military personnel first and seeking people’s ‘consent’ later. If the government claims that local communities genuinely ‘support’ SUMP or similar mega-dam projects (as the govt propaganda states), the answer is simple:  Let the affected communities speak freely. And let their views and rights be respected and given precedence, instead of the vested interests of the dam-builders and corporations.”

Hence the forums have demanded:

• An immediate end to all oppressive measures against the local communities, SIFF, Bhanu Tatak, Ebo Mili and other community leaders and activists, including by misuse of the FCRA law against Bhanu Tatak.

• Immediate withdrawal of all armed forces / military personnel from the indigenous villages, de-militarization and restoration of space for democratic participation by communities in Government decisions that affect their livelihoods, ecology and futures.

• Free, fair and transparent public consultations at the village level must be held in the presence of neutral observers.
• Revocation of all clearances and permissions granted to the hydro-electric and power projects in the region, in violation of law and democratic processes.

Related:

Voices of resistance: Indigenous peoples’ struggle against the Siang Mega-Dam in Arunachal Pradesh

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The post Climate, riverine & indigenous movements from across India express full solidarity with the democratic anti-dam struggle in Arunachal Pradesh appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Stating that they are deeply dismayed at the recent reports of large scale, state driven deforestation due to diversion of forestlands for developmental projects, the open letter cites a July 2026, reply of the Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change in response to a Parliament question. Further, the communication states that, in the five years from 2014–15 to 2018–19, a total of 74,705.68 ha of forestland was approved for diversion. In the next five-year period from 2019–20 to 2023–24, this increased, by nearly 29 per cent, to 96,112.90 hectares. If the current pace continues, forest land diversion during the next five years is likely to exceed 110,000 hectares. Besides, the increase in deforestation is most evident in the ecologically sensitive Himalayan and North Eastern states, in Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, etc. And many other proposals are in the offing, the most appalling of them being the cutting down of nearly a million trees, over 13000 hectares of rainforest in Great Nicobar Island.

The communication also emphasises that, the compensatory afforestation that is expected to be undertaken for the diversion of these forest areas is either not undertaken or if undertaken is almost never successful. The proposals are also, often, ludicrous, e.g. taking up compensatory afforestation for the rainforests of Great Nicobar in dry Haryana, 4500 km away.

Within this alarming trend, of particular concern is the fact that lands within National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries. I.e. Protected Areas (PAs) along with their Eco-Sensitive Zones (ESZs) are also being diverted at an alarming pace. Proposals to divert lands inside PAs require the approval of the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife (SC-NBWL), a statutory body   tasked with promotion, conservation and development of wildlife and their habitats. However, it is seen that 97% of the diversion proposals placed before the SC-NBWL since 2014 have been cleared.  In just four meetings held in 2024 and 2025, as much as 5824 ha of land inside PAs and ESZs have been cleared for non-forest use with as many as 100 plus proposals getting cleared in almost every meeting.  The diversions permitted were for industrial parks, quarrying, mobile towers, tunnels, oil refineries, railway lines, synthetic organic chemical manufacturing unit, petrochemical park, temples, helipads, mining, hotels, apartment complexes, oil drilling, etc. – entities which in no way benefit wildlife and their habitats. More worryingly, an increasing trend of diversions is noted in Protected Area clearances with every passing year: from 91 projects within Protected Areas granted clearance in 2019, the number steadily increased to 378 in 2024 and 312 in 2025.  PAs make up only 5.4% of the geographic area of the country and the headwaters of many rivers originate in these PAs, providing water and ecological security to the country.  Fragmentation of forests and wildlife habitat drastically reduces the ability of these areas to perform their vital role as a green lung for the country.

How did this happen

The implementation of infrastructure development, mining, etc. through diversion of forests and Protected Areas, has been possible due to the weakening of environment and conservation laws by the government as well as through judicial rulings.  For instance, the Forest Conservation Amendment Act 2023, has   redefined forests in a way that leaves out huge tracts of forested land from legal protection and allows easy diversion of such lands.

Projects which have gone ahead without obtaining the mandatory forest clearances as required under law are being regularised on payment of nominal fines, or by the ridiculous requirement that the violator undertake three to five times penal compensatory afforestation. This is totally antithetical to environmental jurisprudence which directs that EIAs should be done prior to commencement of the project and the diversion of forest and other lands, and not as a fait accompli after the project has started.   After the Forest Conservation Act of 1980 was amended and the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam or the Forest Conservation Amendment Act came into being in 2023, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change  has, in just two years (2024–25 and 2025–26), already approved the diversion, for non-forestry purposes, approximately 22562 ha of forestland per year , as compared to an average of 19223 hectares per year during the five year period 2019 – 24, and 14941 hectares  per year for the preceding  five year period.

The letter also contends that, the SC-NBWL, which is constituted of mainly top government officials, unfortunately, “seems to have no hesitation in approving almost all the diversion proposals placed before it.  It is particularly condemnable that in the past decade more than 30 wildlife sanctuaries and National Parks have been de-notified or drastically reduced in area to enable easy diversions of their land for “developmental” projects.  This includes the Megapode Wildlife Sanctuary as well as the Galathea Bay Wildlife Sanctuary in Great Nicobar, despite the latter being India’s most important and the northern Indian Ocean’s largest nesting site for endangered giant leatherback turtles.”

The recent Supreme Court ruling in July 2026 stating that post-facto environmental clearances (ECs) are legally acceptable if they are authorised by a post-facto valid statutory notification under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, does nothing to improve matters, permitting the central government to regularise violations under Section 3 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.  The Court effectively replaces the ’precautionary principle’ (preventing harm) while dealing with India’s environment with a “pollute and pay” model.  Entrepreneurs can construct big-ticket projects without taking any of the mandatory prior clearances, present the government with a fait accompli and simply pay compensation to stay operational.

Every day brings a new, foolhardy proposal to reduce forested and wildlife protected areas. One such is the recent proposal of the Assam Government to reduce the Eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) of the iconic Kaziranga National Park from 10 Kms to 1 km and allow brick kilns, stone crushers, hotels, commercial warehouses, etc., to operate much closer to the park boundary. It does not apparently matter that the rhinoceros population will be severely and adversely affected. Another such proposal is the use of 12.6 hectares of the Delhi Ridge for the President’s Bodyguard parade ground, which, if implemented, will further fragment the already degraded ridge in Delhi which serves as a green lung for the metropolis.

Do highways mean growth?

The recent push for “development” arises from a misguided understanding that roads, infrastructure, mines, etc. will ensure the growth of the country. There is no realisation that an unpolluted environment together with extensive forest cover and thriving wildlife is even more important for human well-being. Recently issued environmental, forest and wildlife laws, rules and office orders along with “development friendly” judicial rulings have weakened the earlier strong environmental and conservation approach of the country.

The over 700 signatories state that while they acknowledge that infrastructure development projects are necessary for the country, but they should not come at the cost of ecological security. This can only imperil the country as evident from the massive landslides, mudslides, alarming AQI’s, heat waves, deluges, floods, and other environmental calamities occurring across the country. Such a prioritisation is against all aspects of the “precautionary principle” and “intergeneration equity” enunciated by the Supreme Court, as well as being in contravention of Articles 48 A and 51 A of the Constitution and most importantly of Article 21, the Right to Life.

Finally, the communication urges both the government and the judiciary to prioritise the ecological security of our country and the health and life of its citizens over the false narrative of more roads, more buildings, more townships, more mines, more industries, and more destruction of the natural world that is currently seen as progress.

Constitutional Conduct Group (77 signatories as below)

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The post Prioritise ecological security of country over “false narrative” of “highway development”: CCG to Govt & Courts appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The assault was not an isolated disagreement over music. It was the latest and most disturbing episode in a controversy that has exposed a larger question: who gets to decide how much noise a religious celebration can impose on everyone else?

The Indian Express reported that Bapat was attacked while giving a live interview, with the assault captured on camera. Pune Police Commissioner Amitesh Kumar said the accused had been arrested and that a cognisable, non-bailable case would be registered. Bapat was subsequently provided police protection.

JUST IN: Footage shows Vidyanand Bapat being slapped while giving a byte to TV9 Marathi in Pune earlier today. A man approached and allegedly hit Bapat as he spoke to the channel, after which others joined in. Raising your voice on civic issues shouldn’t invite a mob. pic.twitter.com/x3CxMKB0vU

— Varad Bhatkhande | Journalist (@VaradBhatkhande) September 3, 2026

A protest was held at Kalakar Katta on Fergusson College Road in Shivajinagar, Pune, demanding justice for Santosh Pandit and Vidyanand Bapat.

Citizens and activists gathered under the banner of Jagruk Punekar, raising slogans and calling for justice for both individuals.… pic.twitter.com/Uqzz2pdn1v

— Punekar News (@punekarnews) September 4, 2026

From one voice at a civic meeting to a statewide debate

The controversy began on August 24, when the Pune Municipal Corporation held its preparatory meeting for Ganeshotsav, scheduled to begin on September 14. Among several hundred people present, Bapat was reportedly the only person to object to the use of DJs and dhol systems. His argument was straightforward: the festival should not become a source of excessive noise, traffic disruption and public inconvenience. He invoked the history of Ganeshotsav, pointing out that when Lokmanya Tilak popularised the public festival, DJ systems obviously did not exist. He argued that amplified music was neither intrinsic to the festival nor necessary for its celebration.

I don’t want publicity only! I am perfectly okay if the alley dogs don’t know who I am.
What I want is a solution to the problems citizens are actually enduring. This isn’t about getting attention, it’s about getting things fixed. He is talking in crystal clear terms.
Our…

— Shilpa Godbole (@godbole_shilpa) August 30, 2026

The response was hostile. Bapat was shouted down and eventually escorted out by the police as tensions rose. But footage of the confrontation circulated widely on social media, transforming an otherwise ordinary civic meeting into a national talking point. The controversy was then amplified by Marathi television.

ABP Majha brought Bapat face-to-face with BJP Pune city president Dheeraj Ghate. During the debate, Bapat calmly explained his position on noise pollution. Ghate reportedly mocked him, asking who even knew Bapat in his neighbourhood. The exchange subsequently went viral. Within days, television channels, YouTube platforms and social-media personalities were interviewing Bapat. He repeatedly made the same argument, drawing on Sanskrit texts, the Mahabharata, Greek and Latin literature and his own rationalist worldview. His fluency in Marathi, Sanskrit, Hindi and English and his refusal to be provoked made him a social-media sensation.

The real issue is not whether festivals should be celebrated

The debate has sometimes been presented as a conflict between religious devotees and people opposed to Ganeshotsav. That is a misleading frame. Bapat has not argued against Ganeshotsav. Neither have many of the citizens who have subsequently joined the campaign.

At a Goodluck Chowk gathering, protesters explicitly said that their objection was to excessive noise from DJs, loudspeakers, dhol-tasha systems and other high-intensity sound equipment — not to Ganeshotsav itself. Hindustan Times reported similar assertions from participants who said the restrictions should apply to every religious celebration, irrespective of religion.

Hundreds gathered at Goodluck Chowk in Pune on Friday, protesting Santosh Pandit’s arrest and demanding answers over the 1am police action. Protesters also expressed solidarity with Vidyanand Bapat, who was assaulted while speaking against high-decibel DJs. pic.twitter.com/SxfuX6TNs7

— Varad Bhatkhande | Journalist (@VaradBhatkhande) September 4, 2026

A constitutional democracy does not give religious expression a licence to override the rights of everyone around it. Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from regulation. Public celebrations take place in shared civic spaces, and their exercise necessarily has to coexist with the rights of residents, children, elderly people, patients, workers, motorists and others. The question, therefore, should not be whether Ganeshotsav is important. It plainly is. The question is why excessive noise has been allowed to become synonymous with celebration in the first place.

The numbers make the argument harder to dismiss

The College of Engineering, Pune has measured noise levels on Lakshmi Road during Ganesh immersion for roughly 25 years. With the exception of the pandemic years, readings have consistently exceeded 80 decibels. The levels recorded in recent years were particularly stark: 105.2 decibels in 2022, 101.3 in 2024 and 94.8 in 2025.

The Union Environment Ministry’s prescribed limits are substantially lower. In residential areas, the permissible limit is 55 decibels during the day and 45 at night. Even commercial areas have limits of 65 and 55 decibels respectively.

For years, the state has known that noise levels during major processions can far exceed permissible standards. The more uncomfortable question is: why has enforcement remained so inconsistent?

The politics of noise

Several Ganesh mandal representatives and BJP leaders initially opposed Bapat’s position and defended DJs and dhol during the festival. Yet once the issue gained significant public support, political leaders began positioning themselves on the side of noise control.  BJP leader and Maharashtra Higher and Technical Education Minister Chandrakant Patil appealed to Punekars not to overuse DJs and laser beams. Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya similarly welcomed citizen mobilisation around clean air and reduced noise. Neither, however, publicly challenged the BJP’s local leadership that had been supporting the use of DJs.

Chief Minister Fadnavis adopted an equally cautious position at the BJP state executive meeting in Pune on August 31, calling for festivals to be celebrated in a “cultured” manner without directly taking a clear position on the DJ controversy. That changed somewhat after the assault.

On September 4, Fadnavis described DJ noise as being comparable to the sound of an earthquake and called for a return to more traditional forms of Ganeshotsav. Hindustan Times reported that he also argued that consensus and dialogue were necessary to reduce the use of such systems. But there is an obvious political contradiction here. If excessive noise is genuinely harmful, the state does not need to wait for a viral citizen campaign or an assault before taking a firm position. The legal framework already exists.

Solapur shows that another model is possible

Pune is not the first Maharashtra city to confront this issue. Solapur has moved towards a DJ-free Ganeshotsav, with the campaign emerging from citizen mobilisation rather than merely being imposed from above. The effort followed growing concern about the health and civic consequences of high-decibel celebrations.

The campaign acquired particular force following accounts of two incidents in 2025 involving the alleged health consequences of excessive festival noise. A citizen who objected to loud music during Shiv Jayanti reportedly suffered permanent hearing loss after being forced to sit near speakers, while another young man reportedly suffered a fatal heart attack after dancing to loud DJ music during a procession. The resulting campaign brought together lawyers, doctors, senior citizens and students and reportedly collected tens of thousands of signatures. Solapur demonstrates that religious celebration and restraint do not have to be opposites.

The movement is now larger than Bapat

Bapat may have become the face of the Pune controversy, but the demand predates him. The campaign against DJs has been building for several years. In 2023, Sunil Mane, an Ambedkarite and former journalist who is now associated with the NCP (Sharad Pawar), petitioned against DJ use during Ambedkar Jayanti processions, Hindustan Times reported.

By August 30, hundreds of people had gathered at Goodluck Chowk despite the cancellation of a proposed march by Sakal Hindu Samaj, as per the report of Free Press Journal. One participant told reporters that elderly residents and heart patients were particularly affected by the noise. Another directly warned the BJP leadership that voters who had supported the party could change their political loyalties if they felt their concerns were being ignored.

Nagpur has moved from appeals to enforcement

Nagpur Police have imposed restrictions on high-powered DJ systems, customised sound trucks, multi-speaker systems and other high-intensity amplified equipment under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. The order, effective from September 3 to November 1, covers multiple festivals, including Ganeshotsav, Eid, Navratri, Durga Puja, Dussehra and Diwali. Importantly, systems operating within permissible noise limits are not covered by the prohibition.

Nagpur has also restricted high-intensity laser and beam lights on public-safety grounds, citing the possibility of temporary visual impairment for motorists and consequent accidents. The city has simultaneously created a mechanism through which citizens can report noise pollution, upload evidence and track complaints, with the system reportedly requiring action within 30 minutes and providing for escalation if no response is recorded.

The state must protect dissent, not merely condemn violence after the fact

The assault on Bapat should not become another moment when political leaders condemn violence only after it has occurred while ignoring the conditions that allow intimidation to flourish. Bapat was not attacked while obstructing a procession. He was attacked while speaking to journalists.

His position could be challenged. His arguments could be criticised. His understanding of tradition could be disputed. His demand for a ban could be opposed. But none of these disagreements legitimises physical violence.

The Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, while condemning the assault, warned that allowing violence to replace argument creates a dangerous precedent: if people become afraid to speak about noise pollution, they may eventually become afraid to speak about corruption, superstition, pollution or injustice more broadly. NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar similarly said that assaulting someone for exercising the right to express an opinion amounts to an attack on democracy. He also backed restrictions on DJs and loudspeakers and pointed to Solapur and other districts as examples.

Former MLC Sandip Joshi has supported a complete ban on DJs and laser systems and described the assault on Bapat as an act of cowardice. He has been campaigning for restrictions beyond the immediate festive period. But BJP city president Dayashankar Tiwari and MLA Pravin Datke have opposed the restrictions. Datke questioned why restrictions were being imposed during Hindu festivals, while the BJP maintained that the leaders were speaking in their individual capacities.

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The post Pune’s DJ Controversy, Ganeshotsav and Assault: The politics of who gets to make noise appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Shompen of Great Nicobar Island stand out as one of India’s most distinctive and endangered tribal communities. Living deep within the island’s forests, they have traditionally followed a semi‑nomadic life of hunting, gathering and horticulture. Their diet—coconuts, bananas, tubers, fish, wild animals and honey—reflects a sophisticated understanding of the forest ecosystem. Their indigenous methods of storing water in bamboo, their linguistic uniqueness and their customary practices have long fascinated anthropologists and administrators. Yet these very characteristics also make them exceptionally vulnerable to external pressures.

Historically, the Shompen have maintained minimal contact with outsiders, a factor that helped preserve their culture but also left them exposed to new risks as interactions increased. Their population numbers tell a story of extreme demographic fragility. Estimates have fluctuated sharply over the past century: 348 in 1901, 375 in 1911 and 1921, dropping to 200 in 1931, plummeting to 20 in 1951, rising again to 212 in 1981, falling to 135 in 1991 and reaching 229 in 2001. These swings must be interpreted cautiously, given the difficulty of enumerating isolated communities, but they nonetheless reveal how even minor disruptions—disease outbreaks, habitat loss or food scarcity—can have catastrophic consequences for such a small population.

Health remains one of the most serious concerns. Indigenous groups with limited historical exposure to communicable diseases are at heightened risk when contact with outsiders increases. The Andaman Islands have witnessed outbreaks of measles, mumps and tuberculosis among other tribal communities, underscoring the dangers of uncontrolled interaction. For the Shompen, healthcare policy must strike a delicate balance: ensuring access to essential services without exposing them to infectious diseases or creating dependency on external institutions. Preventive, culturally sensitive strategies—surveillance, vaccination where appropriate, nutritional support and emergency response—must be designed with respect for autonomy and minimal intrusion.

The Shompen’s survival is inseparable from the forests of Great Nicobar. Their traditional economy depends on access to wildlife, water sources and forest produce. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 sought to safeguard indigenous territories by restricting land transfers and outsider access. Yet protected areas can create dilemmas when conservation measures unintentionally limit indigenous communities’ access to resources they have relied on for generations. Protection must therefore prioritize tribal rights rather than impose rigid administrative boundaries. Encroachment, agricultural expansion, commercial extraction and unauthorized entry threaten both the forest ecosystem and the Shompen’s livelihood security.

Contact with outsiders remains one of the most sensitive policy issues. Tourism, settlement and infrastructure development have increased opportunities for interaction, often with harmful consequences. Experiences involving other indigenous groups in the islands reveal how treating tribal communities as tourist attractions can lead to exploitation, cultural disruption and nutritional decline. When traditional food systems are replaced by market commodities, diets may become inadequate or unhealthy. Policy must follow the principle of minimum necessary contact, ensuring that interaction occurs only for essential purposes such as healthcare, protection or administration.

Tourism, in particular, demands strict ethical safeguards. The controversies surrounding the Andaman Trunk Road illustrate how commercial interests can overshadow indigenous rights. The Shompen must never be approached, photographed or displayed for entertainment. Their privacy, dignity and right to determine the nature of contact must take precedence over tourism revenue. Responsible tourism requires prohibiting exploitative encounters and preventing entry into protected tribal territories except under strictly regulated conditions.

Education presents another complex challenge. The Shompen possess their own language, ecological knowledge and cultural practices. Conventional schooling, if imposed without sensitivity, may erode indigenous knowledge and produce limited outcomes. Experiences from Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh show that educational programmes become more effective when they incorporate local languages and traditional learning systems. For the Shompen, flexible, community‑based approaches—introduced only with their consent—may be more appropriate than mass‑schooling models.

Government policy in the islands has evolved from colonial settlement and penal administration to post‑independence efforts aimed at protecting tribal communities. The 1956 Regulation established a legal framework for safeguarding indigenous territories, and subsequent measures strengthened restrictions on unauthorized access, tourism and photography. Research institutions have contributed to documenting tribal societies and informing policy. Yet legislation alone cannot ensure protection; effective implementation, monitoring and coordination are essential.

The Shompen require a policy approach tailored to their unique circumstances. Their territorial rights must be protected from encroachment. Contact with outsiders should be strictly regulated. Healthcare interventions must prioritize disease prevention and nutritional security. Cultural preservation—including documentation of language and traditional knowledge—should be undertaken only with community consent. Traditional food systems and livelihoods must be strengthened rather than replaced. Tourism must never compromise their dignity. Governance should respect their choices and customary institutions. Data collection must be careful, ethical and non‑intrusive.

The way forward lies in protecting the Shompen’s relationship with their environment. Their traditional practices—hunting, gathering and horticulture—are finely adapted to Great Nicobar’s ecology. Development interventions must avoid disrupting this balance. Infrastructure and economic projects in the Nicobar Islands must be planned with sensitivity to ecological and tribal concerns. The goal is not assimilation into mainstream society, nor romanticized isolation that denies essential services. The appropriate path lies between these extremes: protection without exploitation, assistance without dependency, development without displacement and contact without coercion.

The Shompen’s future depends on decisions made today. Their small population, isolation and dependence on natural resources make them acutely vulnerable. The history of tribal administration in the islands shows that even well‑intentioned interventions can produce unintended harm when indigenous autonomy and ecological realities are ignored. Policy must therefore place the Shompen’s life, land, health, culture and dignity at its centre. Their survival should not be measured by integration into mainstream society, but by their ability to retain identity, knowledge, territorial security and dignity while receiving essential protection when needed.

*Associate Professor (Retd.), National Institute of Rural Development (NIRD)

Courtesy: CounterView

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In a statement issued on Sunday, August 9, the organisations said that the Committee has been entrusted with examining the overall ecology of the Aravalli region, its impact on people’s lives, social and economic conditions, water resources and groundwater, mining, employment, animal husbandry and other related issues.

Such an assessment is simply not possible through what amounts to a token tour of nine districts in just four days, the organisations said.

Only One Hour for the Ajmer Hearing

The organisations also questioned the decision to allot only one hour for the Ajmer public hearing. People were invited from different districts, but were asked to make their submissions within just two minutes. This, they said, clearly demonstrates that the Committee is not serious about hearing the concerns and experiences of different sections of the population.

The organisations had submitted the names of 11 representatives from Ajmer, Jaipur, Beawar, Bhim and Bhilwara to represent the people. However, only a few were actually given an opportunity to speak.

The organisations strongly condemned the systematic hijacking of today’s Ajmer public hearing by the mining lobby, with large numbers of mining operators and other stakeholders reportedly brought in from Nagaur and Makrana.

The presence of hundreds of people associated with the mining business, who repeatedly raised their hands in a show of strength during the proceedings, raises serious questions about the role of the administration and suggests possible administrative complicity, the organisations said.

No Genuine Effort to Involve the Public

There was no meaningful effort by the administration to inform or involve ordinary people in the public hearing. No public notice was issued in newspapers and no adequate publicity was undertaken. As a result, there was very little participation from rural areas.

Instead, the gathering of government officials from different departments and large numbers of business representatives appeared to be an attempt to create the appearance of a public hearing, the organisations alleged.

When representatives of people’s organisations objected to the manner in which the hearing was being conducted, attempts were made to silence them, and several sections were denied an opportunity to put forward their views.

Aravalli Cannot Be Discussed Without Those Who Live and Work There

The organisations emphasised that any meaningful discussion on the Aravallis remains incomplete without the participation of rural communities, farmers, pastoralists, environmental activists, scientists, geologists and experts on water and groundwater resources.

The Committee must travel to rural areas and mining-affected regions and directly examine the ground realities faced by local communities, they said. It must also meet and directly assess the condition of silicosis patients whose lives have been devastated by mining.

Concerns over the Composition of the High-Level Committee

The organisations also termed the composition of the High powered Committee inappropriate and demanded representation for all relevant stakeholders.

They pointed out that it is deeply problematic that the Chairperson and two members of the Committee are representatives of the very department that had earlier recommended that only hills rising more than 100 metres should be considered part of the Aravallis.

The exclusion of even a single environmental activist from the Committee is equally alarming and indicates, the organisations said, that the government continues to pursue a policy of protecting the interests responsible for the destruction of the Aravallis, rather than protecting the range itself.

“Mining Lobby Creates an Unsafe Atmosphere”

The most disturbing development, the organisations said, was the aggressive behaviour and threatening and violent language used by persons associated with the mining lobby during the public hearing.

Representatives of people’s organisations were specifically targeted. After the hearing, some of the mining lobby representatives confronted them outside the venue, engaged in heated arguments, hurled abuses and issued threats, creating an atmosphere of considerable insecurity.

The organisations said that such intimidation is completely unacceptable in a process that is supposed to provide a safe and democratic space for citizens to express their concerns.

Demands for a Genuine and Comprehensive Process were made

Representatives of the people’s organisations, including Kavita Srivastava, Bhanwar Meghwanshi, Anant Bhatnagar, Indira Pancholi, Shankar Singh, Komal Srivastava, Tarachand Verma, Dhiresh Kumar Jain, Shashi Meena, Prashant Patni, Mary Reen, Rajkumar Nahar, Suresh Mathur, Jyoti Prakash Bhati, Kuldeep Gehlot and Neelam Ahluwalia, have demanded:

(i) Extension of the tenure of the High-Level Committee

(ii) A transparent and meaningful process to ensure participation of the general public;

(iii) Adequate opportunity for all affected sections and stakeholders to present their views;

(iv) A comprehensive study covering all districts falling within the Aravalli region;

(v)Field visits to rural and mining-affected areas;

(vi) Direct assessment of the impact of mining on communities, including the condition of silicosis-affected workers and families; and

(vii) A comprehensive ecological, social, economic and hydrological assessment of the Aravalli region before any final conclusions are drawn.

The People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Save Aravalli, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, Save Dol Ka Badh Movement, Shahabad Valley Sangharsh Samiti, Climate Action for Youth, Jaldhara, People for Aravalli, and other organisations said that if the Committee fails to make the process genuinely participatory and inclusive, people’s organisations will organise their own genuine public hearings at different locations across the Aravalli region.

Related:

In North Gujarat’s Granite-Rich Idar, Locals Fearful About Aravalli Mountains’ Future

Say No to ‘Toxic Governance’: Arrest air pollution, not activists and protesters: NACEJ

Whose ‘ENVIRONMENT’ is it, anyway?

The post As mining lobby “hijacks” Ajmer public hearing, “tokenism” on Aravallis condemned appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Sadly, some claim the Kho originates further ahead from the forests at Dadamandi-Dwarikhal but accepting this would render the historically significant Langurgad meaningless. Langurgarhi holds a prominent place in Uttarakhand’s history as it was here in 1790 that Garhwali soldiers, after a year of fierce fighting, forced the invading Gurkha forces to retreat. The site lies about 25 km from Dogadda town, at an altitude of roughly 2,700 meters. Langur-gad is named as it actually is sourced from the forests in the Langur Patti or Languri or Langurgarhi and its adjoining forests. It ends its journey traversing nearly 20 kilometres to a scenic place of Dogadda where it meets the other river emerging from Sila village forests near Lansdown. The new river emerges out of this confluence is known as Kho or Khoh.

Dogadda has long been a culturally and politically important town in Uttarakhand. It deserves official recognition as the origin point of the Kho River like Devprayag, the sacred confluence of the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi. The Uttarakhand government should take a clear decision on this matter by officially acknowledging Dogadda as the source place of river Khoh and ask the local bodies there to act fast to preserve its beautiful confluence.

The most important thing is that both these tributaries, Langurgarh and Silgarh, carry water year-round and are not mere seasonal streams. During the monsoon, they turn fierce and aggressive, carrying tons of stones and boulders. Nothing can stand against their force. Having grown up in Dogadda, my birthplace, I am witness to its beauty as well as fury since my childhood when these rivers ran crystal clear and their gentle murmuring turning into a roar during the rains. But today, when I look at Langurgad towards Dadamandi or Silgad towards Lansdowne, I actually feel depressed at their ‘plight’. They were the place where we really enjoyed walking around and watching their powerful fury during the monsoon. How, we would debate among ourselves as which is bigger or which carries more water and devastation.

Today, large resorts have taken over the riverbanks. Water is blocked at multiple points to create recreational pools for tourists. People drive their Thars and other SUVs straight into the riverbeds. The river’s entire character has changed. Uncontrolled mining has inflicted further damage. It is extremely painful to see big vehicles being washed on the river and passing through it at various places.

Visiting the confluence at Dogadda filled me with sorrow. This was once our childhood playground, where we watched the rivers swell with terrifying power during monsoons. Today, people stand inside both Silgad and Langurgad, blocking the flow to create private pools. The growing number of riverside resorts is making the problem worse. By the time the water reaches the main confluence, the situation is even more dire. At the junction, Silgad barely has any visible flow. Grass has overgrown the area, and sewage from nearby markets flows directly into it. A sign at the municipal sewerage plant claims ₹21 lakh was spent, yet locals say the untreated waste continues to pollute the river at the confluence.

Can the local municipality and Uttarakhand government not stop these unauthorised constructions along the riverbanks to keep it alive?

Can they not organize cleaning drives with community help?

Mountain Rivers particularly those we term as smaller ones, are inherently beautiful and while smaller in size or volume, they have life and energy. Their clear, bubbling waters reflect their vitality. Small rivers like these also flow close to farmers and local communities because they are directly linked to their daily lives. Farmers draw water easily from them, and people once bathed in natural deep pools known locally as “Dhandi”. Those natural pools have now vanished. Outsiders have built stone walls across the rivers, artificially altering their flow and character. Water is dammed everywhere so tourists can lounge for hours. Riverside resorts are drawing more visitors, turning the rivers into venues for parties and recreation.

After the confluence of Langurgad and Silgad at Dogadda, the newly formed Kho River flows towards Kotdwar, a town at the distance of about 10 kilometres. The stretch between Dogadda and Kotdwar is particularly scenic: the river winds through massive rocks and boulders. Because the riverbed is not easily accessible, the water remains remarkably clean.  Dogadda’s famous Durga temple provides a beautiful view of the river carving its way through huge rocks. This section also serves as a vital watering point for wild elephants. Herds are frequently spotted here, as the area forms an important part of Rajaji National Park.

By the time the Kho reaches Siddhbali temple in Kotdwar, its condition deteriorates. The river splits into several channels — some naturally, others turned into small bathing pools by visitors. Tourists throng the area. Men, women, and children search for spots to bathe. The riverbed is full of stones brought down during monsoon floods. Beyond Kotdwar, the river reaches Saneh Park and Saneh Road, marking the beginning of its journey through the plains. By now, it has been joined by a couple of local streams and appears fuller. Saneh Road, located on the Najibabad-Kotdwar railway line, lies in a forested zone frequented by wild animals and remains remarkably scenic.

In its final stretch, the Kho River crosses several small towns in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh. After traveling approximately 112 kilometres, it merges with the Ramganga River at Latifpur Bila (or Latifpur Ba) village in Dhampur tehsil. Honestly speaking, at the confluence, the Kho often appears larger than the Ramganga. This is because a massive dam at Kalagarh upstream drastically reduces the Ramganga’s flow, with water released only through barrages at a few points.

Interestingly, a barrage has also been constructed on the Kho River at Sherkot, about 25 km before the confluence. From here, an 82-km-long feeder canal supplies water to the Ganga. The main Ganga flows from Haridwar through Bijnor to Garhmukteshwar. At Haridwar’s Bhimgoda barrage, most of the Ganga’s water is diverted into the Upper and Lower Ganga Canals. The “divine” waters seen at ‘Har ki Pauri’ is actually canal water. The real, depleted Ganga can be seen near Chandi Ghat bridge, where the riverbed often lies almost dry. After Haridwar, the Ganga enters Uttar Pradesh at village Balawali in Bijnor district. Its course from Bijnor to Garhmukteshwar remains largely dry except during the monsoon.

This drying of rivers is devastating agriculture in the Gangetic plain. While large canals serve thousands of villages, fields along the natural river courses suffer severe water scarcity. At Garhmukteshwar Ganga water gets life from the direct water of Kho River released from Sherkot Barrage through its feeder Canal. Every day, 535 cusecs of water from the Sherkot Kho barrage travels through 82 kilometres long canal and merges with the Ganga at Tigri Ghat near Garhmukteshwar, helping keep the river alive in that region. However, excessive human interference with river waters — largely in the name of agriculture — is fundamentally altering their character and causing ecological damage. We have actually moved to a point where these rivers are increasingly being managed only to meet religious and tourism needs at specific ghats and pilgrimage sites, while the water for farming continues to decline due to climate change, rampant mining, and illegal construction of resorts and hotels along mountain streams. In effect, our rivers are being converted into entertainment zones, severing their vital connections with local communities, farmers, and indigenous people to cater to urban elite desires.

Read a previous report on the impact of religious tourism in Uttarakhand by the author here.

While the Kho River breathes new life into the Ganga near Garhmukteshwar, its main channel meets the Ramganga about 28 kms away at Latifpur Bila Ahatmali in Dhampur tehsil. Even here, multiple barrages on the Ramganga (after the Kalagarh dam) leave it depleted — and once again, the Kho revives it. The Ramganga then flows through Moradabad and Shahjahanpur before joining the Ganga at Hardoi, where the confluence area also resembles a desert. Further downstream, water reappears at Bithoor (22 km before Kanpur) due to yet another barrage, making Bithoor an important religious and recreational spot, while Kanpur’s stretch is dominated by sand mining.

Reaching Confluences is Extremely Difficult

In the plains, accessing river confluences — except at major religious sites — is very challenging. Reaching the Kho-Ramganga or Ramganga-Ganga confluence requires great patience and effort; many places are accessible only on foot or by tractor.  As these are not religious places hence none is bothered about the confluence of the rivers. At the Sherkot barrage on the Kho, grass has overgrown the area and water is barely visible. At Latifpur Bila, the path to the confluence is covered in dust and sand. I attempted to reach it twice in the scorching afternoon heat but failed. A farmer from the Saini community, seeing our struggle, kindly offered to take me on his tractor. The ride was perilous across the sandy, pitted terrain reflecting the flooded area in the monsoon. During the journey, he shared the fact that most locals belong to Dalit and extremely backward communities. He was also critical of the government for harming farmers and expressed faith in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), while observing that the bigger farmers in the area support the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He also mentioned that annual floods from these rivers regularly destroy crops. This year, with no rain yet, only sugarcane has survived. Even if rain arrives late, farmers stand to gain little. Remarkably, despite both rivers flowing through the fields, local agriculture remains heavily dependent on rainfall. This unambiguously means that farming communities living on the bank of the rivers only suffer the devastation caused by floods and benefit little from the river in “normal time”. During the monsoon, the canals are protected and the original rivers get the fury resulting in the water crossing to the nearby fields and destroying the crop, livestock and human life.

The Crisis Facing the Kho River

The Kho is a relatively small river, yet it has sacrificed much of its own identity to sustain the larger Ganga and Ramganga systems. It supplies water to Dogadda and Kotdwar towns and remains a vital cultural lifeline for local communities. In Uttar Pradesh, the barrage on the Kho irrigates hundreds of villages in Bijnor and Moradabad districts.

Tragically, the very river that gives life to the Ganga and Ramganga — and supports countless farmers — is under severe threat at its source. Both the Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments must act urgently, working with local communities, municipalities, and panchayats. Immediate steps are needed to:

– Ban all mining on the Kho River

– Stop the unnatural blocking of water in the river and its tributaries

– Take legal action against illegal resorts and hotels along its banks

Saving the Kho River also means protecting the wildlife habitats of Rajaji National Park and the Kalagarh forest division. Kho river’s ecological and environmental importance can be visualised both right from its beginning till it ends its journey. At places like Dogadda the ground water was available very easily. At the time, when a majority of the hill as well as Tarai regions of Uttarakhand suffer from Potable water crisis, towns like Dogadda were actually a haven for all. The water quality here was extraordinary and people never needed refrigerators in the past as water remained cold during the summer and warm in the winter.

It is time to protect and preserve river Kho so that it continues to give us life and energy.

Related:

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The post Environment: The growing crisis on the Kho River appeared first on SabrangIndia.

An ongoing national campaign says that the project is ‘a disaster in the making’ and demands an end to the Modi-Adani scam being foisted on the nation. It is without doubt that this corrupt duo has looted the nation lock, stock and barrel and together with their other corrupt crony capitalist friends have caused unbelievable damage to the environment and to our fragile eco-systems. In this Nicobar project there is ample evidence that 160 sq. km of rain forest will be destroyed; one crore tress will be cut down; that it is a crime against natural and tribal heritage; that the tribal communities  particularly the Shompen and Nicobarese  who are distinct indigenous groups and Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) native to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; they possess unique cultures, languages, and traditional ways of life, largely centred on Great Nicobar Island; above all a threat to the fragile ecosystem.

The EPW further states, “the project envisions an international container trans-shipment terminal at Galathea Bay, a greenfield international airport, a township and tourism project, and a power plant. The primary trunk infrastructure of the programme alone is slated to destroy 130 square kilometres of primarily tropical rainforests, which, by the government’s underestimation, will involve felling 8.65 lakh trees, a fraction of the likely millions. This will, in a hare-brained plan, be compensated by planting a few lakh trees in distant Haryana and Madhya Pradesh. The Nicobars are the only region in India to fall in the Sundaland global biodiversity hotspot, home to rare and endemic species and globally unique flora and fauna. The notion that the destruction of this ecological hotspot can be compensated for by tree plantations in semi-arid central and northern India is foolish fiction. The Galathea Bay—where the trans-shipment terminal is proposed—is among the most important nesting sites of the endangered leatherback turtle. In January 2021, contradicting the government’s own National Marine Turtle Action Plan, the Galathea Bay was denotified as a protected sanctuary to make way for the infrastructure project.” Scathing points indeed to prove that the regime, cares two hoots about what is happening to our environment!

Yesterday, June 5, was yet another ‘World Environment Day.’ There were a flurry of activities. The morning newspapers (some of them had their front page in ‘green’) had full page advertisements about the environment with several of them sponsored by government agencies, the very ones responsible for destroying the environment! In the ‘events’ there was the usual jostle to plant saplings, the plethora of long, boring speeches on the importance of the environment repeated ‘ad nauseam’ and plenty of photo-ops with faces beaming towards the cameras. Yes, indeed plenty of ‘tokenism’ and ‘cosmetic’ action. And the ‘temporary concern’ for the environment will soon be forgotten!

India is in the grip of a serious environmental crisis. A lead article in the popular online portal ‘Countercurrents’, (dated June 3 , 2026) and titled, ‘The Scorching Heat and Silent Death: India’s heat crisis is killing the poor in silence’ says, “A single day of extreme heat, the study estimates, causes around 3,400 excess deaths across India. A five-day heatwave causes nearly 30,000. Uttar Pradesh alone accounts for more than 8,100 of those deaths. The number 30,000. In five days. That is more than ten times the official annual toll. That is a catastrophe without a name. The five states that bear two-thirds of India’s heatwave deaths are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat.” Several parts of the country are in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave with several casualties, especially among the poor and marginalised sections of society. On May 13 and 14, devastating unseasonal storms, tore through Uttar Pradesh killing at least 120 people and injuring several more. The Aravalli hills continue to be pillaged despite the Supreme Court order that all mining activity in the area should be halted.

Fossil fuels account for almost 75% of India’s total energy supply. We are   highly dependent on fossil fuels despite the global commitment to transition away from their use. It is common knowledge that fossil fuels are the principal driver of the climate change currently damaging human health, wellbeing, and ecosystems, and posing a severe threat to overall planetary health. They are also a major source of particulate matter and ozone. These air pollutants are responsible for a wide range of adverse health outcomes, including an estimated 6.7 million deaths globally in 2019. Deaths however, are only one part of the problem. Improved air quality would reduce the burden of several major diseases leading to healthier and longer lives, fewer patients requiring admission to hospital and other treatments, and decreasing the burden on health systems worldwide.

The theme for ‘World Environment Day’ this year is, ‘Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future’. This obviously is a follow-up of the UN Climate Summit COP30 which took place in Belém, Brazil from November 10 to 21, 2025. COP30 focussed heavily on forest conservation, the transition from fossil fuels and the implementation of the Paris Agreement Goals. Sadly, as we experience in India today, those who rule, do not care about what is happening to our environment!

Public awareness of the importance of the environment is a prerequisite – but then words ring hollow, when the ones who wax eloquent are the very ones who are in nexus with the land mafia who dry up our water bodies for their high-rise buildings and who cohort with the mining mafia to plunder our precious natural resources. It is important to note that in the most recent ‘Environmental Performance Index'(EPI), India was ranked 176 out of 180 countries. A pathetic indicator by any standards on the environmental situation in our country!

About ten days ago, on May 26, India lost one of her great environmentalists, in the untimely death Fr Bolmax Pereira of Goa. Fr Bolmax was not afraid in standing up against the powerful, vested interests, who were destroying the fragile ecosystem of Goa. He launched a successful #SaveMollemForest campaign against the   Adani –led double tracking through the Mollem reserved forest.  He constantly spoke about the reality that the average Goan was breathing coal-dust all the time, thanks to the nexus between the politicians and the mining mafia. He once said, “The wilful damage being inflicted on our environment and ecology is so very colossal. There is a dire need to stay united to save our state from any further destruction… We all need to be very concerned about the air, water and sound pollution that is battering our little Goa.”

Are we serious about following the legacy of Fr Bolmax? Or do we say “who cares”? Like to what is happening in Nicobar today? We must come out now and challenge this anti-people, anti –environment regime and the entire system, and ask them, “whose environment is it, anyway?”

(The author is a human rights reconciliation and peace activist and writer)

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“Let there be CHRISTMAS…”!

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The Himalayas hold the headwaters of the Ganga, Yamuna, Sutlej, Beas, Ravi and Chenab, sustaining vast populations downstream. But this is also a young, unstable and seismically active terrain. Glaciers such as Gangotri and Yamunotri are retreating, exposing loose moraine and weakening slopes. Cloudbursts, landslides and debris flows, as seen in Kedarnath in 2013, are therefore not isolated events but warnings from a fragile system. A small slope cutting, tunnel, or river diversion can disturb water channels; dry village springs, or trigger downstream flooding. Despite this, the region has seen rapid hydropower and infrastructure expansion, involving blasting, tunnelling, river diversion and construction across some of India’s most vulnerable mountain valleys.

These pressures have turned the Himalayan High Courts into something they were never designed to be: the last line of ecological defence. Litigants arrive with public interest petitions seeking to stop dams, protect panchayat authority over local resources, and enforce constitutional environmental rights. The question this study asks is not whether these courts occasionally issue protective orders. They do. The question is whether protection is the pattern or the exception. When ecological harm is demonstrated, do these courts hold the line? Or do they find ways to accommodate the project, the corporation, the state plan? By examining judgments the three High Courts — Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh, the third part of a three-part series maps the architecture of environmental jurisprudence in the mountains and identifies where that architecture cracks under pressure.^[1]

The Architecture of Eco-Centric Protection

The Uttarakhand Eco-Centric Doctrinal Expansion (2016-2018)

There are moments in judicial history when a court steps outside its accustomed vocabulary and speaks a different language. The Uttarakhand High Court between 2016 and 2018 was such a moment. The court produced a trilogy of rulings that received criticism for attempting to restate the environmental jurisprudence. They were attempts to reimagine the legal relationship between the state, the citizen, and the natural world. What makes them significant is not just what they held, but what they asked: if a river sustains life, should it not have standing in court?

In Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand (2017), the court confronted the familiar issue of municipal pollution and encroachment along the Ganga and Yamuna. What it produced was anything but familiar. A Division Bench of Justices Rajiv Sharma and Alok Singh declared these rivers, along with all their tributaries, streams, and torrents, to be legal persons and living entities. This was not metaphor. The Bench exercised its parens patriae jurisdiction to appoint the Director of the Namami Gange project, the Chief Secretary of Uttarakhand, and the Advocate General as guardians acting in loco parentis. The reasoning was stark: rivers breathe. They sustain communities from the glaciers to the sea. To treat them as property is to miss their essence. The court anchored this in Article 21, reading the right to life as extending to the life that the rivers themselves embody.^[2]

Critics have called this approach radical. It was. The traditional legal model treats a river as a thing over which the state has sovereign control, the citizen has riparian rights, and the corporation has extraction permits. Each of these legal relationships assumes the river’s continued existence. None of them guarantees it. By making the river itself a rights-holder, the court inverted the burden of justification.

The doctrinal expansion continued in Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand (2017), where the same Bench extended legal personhood to the broader ecosystem. Gangotri and Yamunotri glaciers gained rights. So did the air, meadows, forests, wetlands, grasslands, springs, and waterfalls of the state. The court did not stop at declaration. It deployed continuing mandamus to direct twenty-one hydroelectric projects on the Ganga’s mainstream to install functional Sewage Treatment Plants within six months. It ordered the Comptroller and Auditor General to conduct a special financial and compliance audit of all centrally financed Ganga rejuvenation schemes, with the report to be placed directly before the President of India. These were not hortatory observations. They were operational commands backed by the contempt power of the court.^[3]

In Narayan Dutt Bhatt v. Union of India (2018), the court extended legal personhood to the entire animal kingdom. Confronted with the cruelty of commercial horse-carts at the Indo-Nepal border, Justices Rajiv Sharma and Lokpal Singh held that the right to life under Article 21 protects all animals, avian and aquatic. Every citizen of Uttarakhand was declared a guardian in loco parentis. The implications were again, radical. For centuries, animals have been property under Indian law. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act treats them as objects of human benevolence. This judgment treated them as subjects of rights. The shift from property to person is not merely semantic. It determines who bears the burden in court. A property owner can do what they please with their property, subject to regulation. A guardian must act in the best interests of the ward. The legal grammar changed from permission to duty.^[4]

The Rishikesh White-Water Rafting Industry case (2018) demonstrated how this eco-centric framework operated in practice. Faced with water pollution, public intoxication, and unregulated adventure sports licensing along the Ganga, the court halted all rafting operations. The Bench explicitly subordinated the importance of regional tourism economy to the importance of ecological health of the river. Commercial activities could resume only when the state implemented a comprehensive, protective regulatory policy. This was the precautionary principle in its purest form: when the ecological stakes are high, activity stops first and proof of safety comes later. The court refused to let commerce continue while regulators deliberated.

The Uttarakhand High Court maintained structural oversight during ecological crises. The Forest Fires Suo Moto Line (2024-2026), initiated by Chief Justice G. Narendar and Justice Subhash Upadhyay, responded to recurring forest fires not with a single order but with sustained administrative reform. The court ordered the state to fill all long-standing vacancies in the Forest Department within six months. It mandated year-round environmental monitoring instead of seasonal tracking. It empowered gram panchayats by establishing village-level fire committees. These orders recognized that environmental protection is not a one-time judicial intervention. It is an ongoing institutional commitment. Forests do not burn because of a single cause. They burn because of cumulative neglect, which includes underfunded departments, absent personnel, and local communities excluded from management. The court addressed the root causes.^[5]

The Himachal Pradesh Community-Centric Protective Model

The Himachal Pradesh High Court demonstrated its protective capacity long before the contemporary era. In General Public of Saproon Valley (1991), the court directed the state to constitute a scientific committee to assess the environmental impact of heavy vehicular traffic through the Solan district and required notification to all project-affected persons before issuing any mining licenses or tree-felling permits. This was three decades before environmental impact assessment became a statutory requirement. The court was operating from first principles: if a project alters the environment, those who live in that environment must know before, not after. The Saproon Valley order established a template that the court would return to repeatedly: protection begins with procedure, and procedure begins with the community.^[6]

The Suo Moto Stone-Crusher PIL Line concerning Bathan and Thural (2019) draws from this community-centric model. Chief Justice Mohammed Rafiq and Justice Sandeep Sharma converted letters from rural residents into public interest litigation. The Neugal River was being destroyed by illegal stone-crushing operations that caused severe slope instability and riverbed erosion. The court’s intervention was swift and targeted. It protected the authority of Gram Panchayat issued No-Objection Certificates against administrative coercion by state industry departments. It enforced strict compliance from the State Pollution Control Board. The precautionary principle was applied at the licensing stage, preventing industrial operations from creating an environmental fait accompli. The court understood what many environmental judgments miss i.e., once a crusher is installed, once a riverbed is mined, once a slope is destabilized, the harm is done. Prevention is the only remedy that works in geographies that are as sensitive as the Himalayas.^[7]

The Gram Panchayats Bhatanwali, Patalia and Behral v. Union of India (2026) extended this procedural protection to federal land-use planning. Local panchayats challenged an Eco-Sensitive Zone notification around the Col. Sherjung National Park in Simbalbara, Sirmaur district. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change had omitted required field surveys, land-use inventories, and joint committee formation as mandated by its own 2011 guidelines. Justices Vivek Singh Thakur and Ranjan Sharma quashed the notification. The ruling was technically procedural, but its ecological impact was substantive. A poorly drawn notification that ignores ground realities is worse than no notification at all. It creates legal confusion, invites non-compliance, and discredits the entire regulatory regime. By enforcing proper procedure, the court protected not just the local panchayats but the integrity of the Eco-Sensitive Zone concept itself.^[8]

Another PIL concerning illegal mining in Bageshwar district demonstrated that the Uttarakhand High Court could still act decisively when the harm was visible and immediate. The court took suo moto cognizance and directed the District Magistrate to personally verify illegal mining operations. It constituted a joint committee for ground-level inspection. These were not complex legal questions requiring nuanced balancing. They were straightforward violations of existing law that administrative agencies had failed to prevent. And the court acted swiftly.^[9]

Jammu and Kashmir: Continuity in Wetland and Alpine Protection

The Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court has demonstrated continuity in its protective stance over environment. Its protective oversight of Dal Lake has spanned more than two decades, surviving the major constitutional reorganization of August 2019 and the transition from state to Union Territory. Successive Division Benches led by Chief Justices Pankaj Mithal, Arun Palli, and N. Kotiswar Singh have maintained seamless oversight of one of the most threatened urban water bodies in the world. When the Master Plan 2035 proposed reducing the 200-meter environmental exclusion zone around Dal Lake to a variable 20-to-100-meter limit, the court intervened directly. In September 2024, it ordered that no new permanent construction would be allowed within the original buffer zones. The warning was explicit: unregulated development could undo twenty years of conservation effort in a single construction season.^[10]

This continuity extends to Wular Lake, where a dedicated litigation line ran from 2021 to 2024. The Wular Lake Conservation and Management Authority had proven ineffective. Illegal encroachments continued. Municipal garbage dumping persisted. Dredging operations moved at glacial speed. In August 2024, Justice Rajnesh Oswal rebuked the authority for failing to meet its objectives and wasting public funds. The court’s frustration was palpable. Public money had been provided by the central government specifically for lake restoration. The authority had absorbed it without producing results. The court’s intervention here was not about legal innovation. It was about institutional accountability. Environmental protection requires institutions that function. When they do not, the court must either reform them or replace their functions with its own oversight.^[11]

The Ramsar Wetlands Suo Motu Line aggregated seven internationally recognized sites across Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, including Hokersar, Shalbugh, Haigam, Surinsar-Mansar, Tso Moriri, and Tso Kar. The court enforced the Wetland Conservation and Management Rules 2017, requiring both Union Territories to coordinate with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and technical bodies like IIT Roorkee for Integrated Management Plans. This was strategic environmental governance at scale. Rather than addressing each wetland individually, the court created a unified oversight framework. The Ramsar designation carries international legal obligations. The court ensured that these obligations would not remain paper commitments.^[12]

The Sonamarg Construction Ban case (2017) represents the one of the most pro-active stances of the Court in environment protection. To shield the Thajiwas Glacier watershed and the Sindh River from tourism-induced degradation, the court banned all unapproved constructions within the Sonamarg Development Authority’s jurisdiction. It made the Chief Executive Officer personally liable under contempt law for any fresh unauthorized structures. It ordered a scientific status report directly from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Kashmir, bypassing standard bureaucratic reporting. This treatment of scientific data as a firm ceiling for development is the antithesis of the balancing approach. Science was not one factor among many. It was the limiting factor. In early 2025, the court reinforced this stance by taking suo moto cognisance of environmental violations in the Gulmarg-Sonamarg road-widening project, converting a newspaper report into PIL and demanding a personal response from the Development Authority’s CEO.^[13]

Structural Cracks and Infrastructure Deference

The Himachal Pradesh Cascade: Hydropower, Mining, and Urban Deregulation

The judgments discussed earlier did protect forests, rivers, lakes, and local communities. However, they are not the usual pattern. In many Himalayan cases, courts speak about balance, development, procedure, and jurisdiction. The language sounds neutral. However, the result often weakens environmental protection.

A clear example is State of Himachal Pradesh v. Yogendra Mohan Sengupta (2024). The NGT had imposed strict limits on height and construction in the Shimla Planning Area. These limits were based on real risks. Shimla sits on fragile slopes. It faces landslides, cloudbursts, and earthquakes. The 2023 monsoon had already shown how dangerous this could be, with major loss of life and damage across Himachal Pradesh.

The Supreme Court lifted those restrictions. It said development and environment had to be balanced. It also held that the NGT could not force the State to frame planning rules in a particular way. On paper, this looked like a technical administrative law issue. In reality, it shifted control back to the State’s planning authorities. These authorities are often more influenced by development pressure than ecological limits.

The Court also distinguished Godavarman, a major forest protection case. This mattered. Instead of treating environmental protection as a strong constitutional duty, the Court treated it as one factor to be balanced against construction. That is the problem. Slopes do not become safer because a plan allows more buildings. Every extra floor adds weight. Every new building adds pressure on water, sewage, drainage, and roads. When the land gives way, the damage is not theoretical. It is physical and often deadly.

A similar problem appears in N.H.P.C. Ltd. v. State of Himachal Pradesh (2024). There, the Himachal Pradesh High Court struck down the State’s water cess on hydropower electricity generation. The Court held that the State did not have the constitutional power to impose such a tax, because electricity generation falls within the Centre’s field. It also ordered refund of the amounts collected.

The reasoning was legal and technical. However, the environmental background was left mostly unaddressed. Himachal’s rivers, including the Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, and Chenab systems, are heavily used for hydropower. These projects divert rivers, tunnel through mountains, change natural flows, and affect downstream communities. The cess was an attempt to make hydropower developers pay at least something for the ecological cost of their projects. By treating the issue mainly as a tax dispute, the Court missed the deeper environmental question. The ecological impact of thirty-plus hydropower projects on a single river basin was never examined. The court’s analysis focused on which level of government has the constitutional power to tax, not on whether the activity being taxed is destroying the resource base that both governments are constitutionally obligated to protect under Article 48A. The ruling thus achieved a double displacement: it removed the state’s financial tool for environmental regulation while legitimizing the fiction that hydropower development is merely an electricity-generation activity rather than a mountain-transforming, river-altering, ecology-disrupting industrial enterprise.

The Alaknanda Hydro Power litigation in Uttarakhand follows an identical pattern. The case centred on environmental clearance for hydroelectric projects on the Alaknanda river system, a major Ganga tributary. The court’s engagement was confined to procedural compliance with environmental impact assessment norms rather than substantive evaluation of cumulative basin-wide impacts. This is the central flaw of environmental litigation in the hydropower sector. Each project is assessed individually. The combined effect of multiple tunnels, multiple diversions, multiple blasting operations on a single geological system is never judicially examined. Environmental scientists have documented the cumulative impact extensively: altered sediment transport, dewatered river reaches, increased seismic stress from reservoir loading, slope destabilization from tunnelling. However, courts continue to treat each project as an isolated legal entity, as if rivers were divisible into segments that can be dammed one at a time without systemic consequence.^[14]

In Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the modification of the Sonamarg Construction Ban in June 2024 reveals how even the strongest protective orders can be eroded through incremental exception. The original 2017 ban, issued to protect the Thajiwas Glacier watershed and the Sindh River, was clear: no new construction within the Sonamarg Development Authority’s jurisdiction. The 2024 order, issued by Chief Justice N. Kotiswar Singh and Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi, created an exception for the Amarnath Yatra. Temporary structures would be permitted within the protected eco-sensitive zones to accommodate pilgrims. The court attached conditions: the structures must be dismantled after the pilgrimage, the land restored. However, the creation of an annual exception to an ecological carrying capacity is not a minor adjustment. It is a precedent. Next year the structures may be larger. The following year, they may be semi-permanent. The glacier does not distinguish between temporary and permanent human pressure. Ice melts the same way regardless of the legal category of the structure above it.^[15]

The Amarnath Yatra brings hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to a fragile high-altitude ecosystem. The waste generated, the water extracted, the vegetation trampled, the slopes compacted, all exceed the area’s natural absorption capacity. The court’s accommodation of this pressure is often framed in terms of religious freedom and public convenience. However, rights are not absolute when they destroy the resource base that makes them possible. The right to pilgrimage assumes the continued existence of the pilgrimage site. If the glacier melts, if the meadows erode, if the river silts up, there is nothing left to pilgrimage. The 2024 Sonmarg modification, like the Char Dham highway expansion, treats environmental protection as an obstacle to be managed rather than a foundation to be preserved.

The Uttarakhand Retreat: From Personhood to Procedural Barrier

The Uttarakhand High Court’s trajectory from 2017 to 2026 traces the arc of environmental promise and judicial retreat more starkly. In 2017, it declared rivers to be legal persons. By 2023, it was dismissing local communities for lack of standing. The speed of this reversal is remarkable

The Mohd. Salim and Lalit Miglani judgments were stayed by the Supreme Court in 2017. The stays were procedural. The apex court did not reject the legal personhood doctrine on merits. It simply prevented implementation while the state government’s appeals were heard. However, procedural paralysis is often the most effective form of doctrinal killing. Seven years later, the Special Leave Petition in Lalit Miglani remains pending. The legal personhood of the Ganga, the Yamuna, the glaciers, the forests, exists on paper but not in practice. No guardian has ever filed a case on behalf of the river. No polluter has ever been held liable for violating a river’s rights. The anthropocentric legal system simply could not operationalize a non-anthropocentric legal concept. State authorities argued, predictably, that granting rights to nature created unmanageable liabilities. What they meant was that it would make their development projects more difficult to approve. The Supreme Court’s stay gave them exactly what they needed: time, during which the projects proceeded and the legal innovation fossilized.^[16]

The procedural retreat became explicit in the Tapovan-Vishnugad PIL line following the Chamoli disaster of February 2021, which should have been a turning point. A glacier collapsed above the Rishi Ganga, triggering a debris flow that devastated the area and provided catastrophic physical evidence of hydropower vulnerability. Local residents from the villages of Raini and Joshimath filed public interest litigation seeking the cancellation of the Rishi Ganga and Tapovan-Vishnugad Hydro Projects and the ecological restoration of the affected watershed. However, in July 2021, rather than stopping construction until safety was proven, the Division Bench shifted the focus entirely from ecological risk to petitioner credibility. The court questioned the standing of the local villagers, scrutinized their identities as “social activists,” and characterized the PIL as a “highly motivated” petition filed by “puppets at the hand of an unknown puppeteer”. It dismissed their challenges and imposed financial costs of Rs. 10,000 on each petitioner.

The reasoning in this July 2021 order was purely procedural. The petitioners were found wanting in locus standi, and the court did not examine whether the Tapovan-Vishnugad project violated environmental norms or assess the scientific evidence regarding the future safety and stability of the disaster-prone terrain. It simply ruled that the wrong people had asked the right questions. This is proceduralism as environmental obstruction. When local communities, who are the first to feel the effects of ecological collapse, are denied standing to challenge the projects that cause it, the court removes the most direct form of democratic environmental accountability. It was not until January 2023—a year and a half later, when severe land subsidence had already made parts of Joshimath uninhabitable—that a different Division Bench finally intervened to grant an interim stay, providing the correct but delayed response that construction must halt when a town is sinking.

The Char Dham Pariyojana tells a similar story of procedural enablement of ecological destruction. The Uttarakhand High Court did not issue pre-construction stays. It allowed the project to proceed while litigation continued. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court as Citizens for Green Doon v. Union of India, the physical reality on the ground had changed. Tunnels had been bored. Blasting had occurred. Hundreds of kilometres of road had been cut into mountain faces. The Supreme Court’s December 2021 order, permitting a 10-meter wide double-lane paved shoulder design, was framed around strategic defence needs and national security. The court treated a 2018 Ministry of Road Transport and Highways circular, advising 5.5-meter limits for hilly terrain, as non-binding for strategic corridors. The environmental rule of law was noted, then balanced away. By June 2025, when citizens petitioned the Chief Justice of India for review following fresh disasters in the Bhagirathi eco-sensitive zone, the project’s financial outlays and physical progress had created an institutional fait accompli. The money was spent. The road was built. The review was rendered practically irrelevant by the sunk costs of ecological destruction.^[17]

The Uttarakhand cases show a clear shift. Earlier, the Court took a more protective approach towards rivers, hydropower projects, and animal welfare. In the later cases, however, it was more willing to defer to development decisions, question the maintainability of local petitions, and treat environmental concerns within narrower legal limits. The change is therefore not only in outcomes, but also in the way the Court frames environmental disputes. It is a change in judicial imagination. The 2016-2018 court imagined a world where ecology governed law. The post-2020 court imagines a world where law governs ecology, and that governance takes the form of balancing, procedural filtering, and incremental accommodation of development.

The Commodification of Ecosystems: Compensatory Afforestation as a Readymade Panacea

The jurisprudence of accommodation does not solely rely on procedural dismissals or jurisdictional sidesteps; it fundamentally alters the conceptual premise of environmental conservation by embracing the commodification of nature. When high-value infrastructure projects—particularly national highways and linear corridors—collide with the protective mandates of forest conservation, the Himalayan High Courts frequently adopt the compensatory paradigm, treating complex, ancient ecosystems as fungible assets that can be mathematically replaced.

In Reenu Paul v. Union of India,^[18] the Uttarakhand High Court assessed the ecological impact of infrastructure projects on forest land. Rather than demanding a rigorous, site-specific ecological appraisal or applying the precautionary principle to limit forest diversion, the Division Bench actively encouraged the State Government to identify “land banks” to serve as a repository for compensatory afforestation. The court commended this as a “proactive stance,” observing that a developer coming up with infrastructural development would have a “readymade solution in the form of the afforestation carried out in advance”. The court reasoned that providing developers with pre-packaged land banks ensures that the project’s cost can simply be borne at pre-fixed rates, enabling a “continuous cycle” of development where the state concurrently creates green cover.

This represents the ultimate crack in environmental jurisprudence. By celebrating a “readymade solution” for infrastructure developers, the court legally validated the myth of ecological interchangeability. A mature Himalayan forest—complete with its specific hydrological functions, soil stabilization capacities, and endemic biodiversity—is treated as functionally equivalent to a monoculture sapling plantation on a designated land bank. The language of environmental protection is retained (the court noted this ensures the “green cover is not impacted seriously”), but its application is entirely facilitative.

Sovereign Exceptionalism: National Security and the Eclipse of Community Commons

When the state invokes national security or acute public need, the ecological evidence test is routinely bypassed. The state’s assertion of necessity functions as a jurisdictional shield, neutralizing Supreme Court precedents designed to protect community ecology.

In Inhabitants of Village Dambra v. UT of J&K,^[19] the Jammu and Kashmir High Court confronted the transfer of 148 Kanals and 1 Marla of Shamlat Deh (Mehfooz Kacharai) land—traditional village grazing commons containing forests and ponds—to the Prisons Department for the construction of a High-Security Prison. The villagers argued that destroying the grazing grounds and water bodies violated the Supreme Court’s stringent directives against alienating community commons, arguing the land required preservation.

The Division Bench dismissed the petition, insulating the project using the language of sovereign security. The court observed that the decision to establish such a prison was taken in view of the prevailing situation in Jammu and Kashmir, which is afflicted by terrorist activities abetted by inimical foreign forces. The court explicitly concluded that the construction of a high-security prison serves a public purpose and is “necessary for the security of the nation.” Crucially, the Supreme Court precedents demanding the strict protection of community ecology and grazing lands were not considered. The court ruled that these precedents “could not be invoked to come in the way of an important project required in public interest and for the security of the Nation”. Ecology was not balanced against security and it was rather entirely eclipsed by it.

A similar dilution occurs when the state voluntarily lowers its own environmental regulations to accelerate extraction. In Inhabitants of Sheva Shirshu Doda v. UT of J&K,^[20] local villagers challenged the installation of a stone crusher and hot mix plant in an environmentally sensitive area. The government had promulgated S.O. 60 of 2021, a highly permissive framework that liberalized the mining regime and removed the need for a Mining Department license for stone crushers by redefining them not as mining units, but merely as “processors of minerals”. Faced with this executive rollback of environmental safeguards, the High Court did not invoke the doctrine of non-regression or the precautionary principle. Instead, the court deferred entirely to the state, citing the limited “scope of judicial review of government policy” and declaring that courts cannot act as appellate authorities over executive formulations. By framing the dispute as a matter of administrative policy rather than an ecological one, the court accommodated the industrial degradation of the mountain landscape.

Procedural Myopia: Weaponising Timelines and Standing to Shield Environmental Harm

The most effective judicial mechanism for accommodating ecological harm without directly contradicting environmental law is procedural dismissal. By focusing intensely on the petitioner’s locus standi, timelines, and procedural technicalities, courts successfully, avoid the burden of assessing complex environmental evidence.

The Jammu and Kashmir High Court’s handling of the Rinkoo Sharma v. Union of India^[21] PILs exemplifies this procedural obstruction. Petitioners challenged the de-notification of the protected Trikuta Wildlife Sanctuary to allow for the extraction of high-grade magnesite and a mining project by the National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) near the Vaishno Devi Shrine. Rather than demanding a rigorous ecological assessment of mining in a highly fragile wildlife zone, the Division Bench interrogated the procedural posture of the petitions. The court noted that the environmental clearance was subject to the final orders of the Supreme Court, rendering the PILs “pre-mature.”

More significantly, the court weaponized procedural rules against the petitioners. It observed that the petitioners, who were advocates, had failed to comply with Rule 24 of the Writ Proceedings Rules, which mandated sending a prior representation to the concerned authorities before filing a PIL. Because this technical pre-requisite was not met, and because the petitioners failed to disclose the pendency of a related PIL, both petitions were dismissed at the threshold. The substantive reality—the irreversible ecological impact of mining in a protected Himalayan wildlife sanctuary—was entirely bypassed via procedural formalism.

The doctrine of delay and laches serves an identical shielding function. In Sumit Nayyar v. Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board ^[22], an advocate filed a PIL challenging the construction of pilgrim infrastructure and mule-track developments by the Shrine Board. The court not only dismissed the petition on the grounds of an eight-year delay and laches, but it also aggressively questioned the bona fides of the petitioner. Citing Supreme Court jurisprudence on frivolous litigation, the court warned that public interest litigation filed by members of the legal profession without serious “home work and enquiry” should be dismissed with exemplary costs to prevent the abuse of the judicial process. By shifting the judicial gaze from the carrying capacity of the Trikuta hills to the conduct and timing of the petitioner, the court effectively insulated the continuous expansion of religious tourism infrastructure from environmental scrutiny.

Conclusion

The environmental jurisprudence of the Himalayan High Courts over the last decade reveals an unsettling paradox: the vocabulary of ecological protection has never been richer, yet the physical landscape has never been more legally vulnerable. The courts of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh have masterfully preserved the text of environmental law while pronouncing judgements that blunt its teeth.

When confronted with the relentless march of state-backed mega-projects, cascade hydropower, and strategic corridors, the judiciary rarely mounts its attack on the basis of precautionary principle or the public trust doctrine. Instead, it engages in a sophisticated jurisprudence of accommodation. As this analysis demonstrates, systemic ecological crises are administratively sanitized, neutralized by the invocation of sovereign “national security” overrides, or deflected through hyper-technical applications of locus standi and laches. The courts do not need to explicitly reject environmental safeguards to permit ecological destruction; they simply change the legal subject.

Even when the courts do intervene, the nature of the intervention has decisively shifted from absolute prohibition to facilitative mitigation. Existential threats to glacial watersheds and fragile seismic zones are reduced to logistical challenges—solved by minor mitigation measures, or the transactional fiction of “readymade” compensatory afforestation banks. The strict legal boundary lines once drawn to protect nature are repeatedly erased and redrawn as mere pricing mechanisms or technical compliance hurdles. The state is permitted to lower the statutory bar, and the polluter is legally validated for successfully stepping over it.

In this accommodative framework, the Himalayas are no longer treated as a sacred public trust or an integrated living ecosystem holding intergenerational equity. They are legally framed as a challenging terrain to be engineered, compensated for, and ultimately conquered. The foundational tenets of Indian environmental law were designed as a hard ceiling against irreversible harm, but they have been retooled into a machinery of concession. Until the Himalayan courts stop subordinating substantive ecological survival to procedural formalism and administrative deference, the majestic peaks, rivers, and forests of the region will continue to be hollowed out, with legal sanction and with the judiciary watching on.

Note: The 3-part series is based on strong empirical standing. Part I dealt with substantive high court pronouncements coming from resource rich Central and Eastern India- Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. Part II (Western India) closely examined judgements emerging from the high courts of Bombay, Karnataka and Goa.

Part IV (Northern India) reflects on judgments from Delhi, Punjab & Haryana, Uttarakhand and Allahabad.

(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

^[1] This article forms Part III of a three-part series examining environmental jurisprudence in the Trans-Himalayan High Courts. Parts I and II Central India and Western India respectively.

^[2] Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand, 2017 SCC OnLine Utt 367, Writ Petition (PIL) No. 126 of 2014, Uttarakhand High Court, judgment dated March 20, 2017.

^[3] Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 140 of 2015, Uttarakhand High Court, judgment dated March 30, 2017.

^[4] Narayan Dutt Bhatt v. Union of India, 2018 SCC OnLine Utt 645, Writ Petition (PIL) No. 43 of 2014, Uttarakhand High Court, judgment dated July 4, 2018.

^[5] In the Matter of Forest Area, Forest Health, and Wildlife Conservation (Forest Fires Suo Motu Line), W.P. (PIL) No. 174 of 2024, Uttarakhand High Court, orders dated December 31, 2025 and March 18, 2026.

^[6] General Public of Saproon Valley and Ors. v. State of Himachal Pradesh, Civil Writ Petition No. 595 of 1991, Himachal Pradesh High Court, judgment dated April 24, 1991.

^[7] Court on Its Own Motion v. State of Himachal Pradesh (Bathan, Thural Stone-Crusher Line), CWPIL No. 12 of 2019, Himachal Pradesh High Court.

^[8] Gram Panchayats Bhatanwali, Patalia and Behral v. Union of India, Civil Writ Petition, Himachal Pradesh High Court, judgment dated April 16, 2026.

^[9] In the Matter of Unauthorized Mining and Illegal Construction near Dwarahat (Bageshwar), W.P. (PIL) No. 35 of 2024, Uttarakhand High Court, order dated December 31, 2025.

^[10] Syed Iqbal Tahir Geelani v. State of Jammu & Kashmir, PIL No. 27/2017 (formerly PIL No. 159/2002), Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court, order dated September 12, 2024.

^[11] Kashmir Environmental Protection v. State of Jammu & Kashmir (Wular Lake Line), PIL No. 14 of 2021, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court, order dated August 22, 2024.

^[12] In Re Protection of Seven Ramsar Wetlands in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, Suo Motu PIL No. 35 of 2018, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court, order dated August 14, 2024.

^[13] Court on Its Own Motion v. Sonamarg Development Authority, PIL No. 27/2017, Jammu and Kashmir High Court, construction ban baseline order dated October 23, 2017. See also Court on Its Own Motion v. UT of J&K & Ors., Suo Motu PIL No. 27/2017, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court, order dated January 3, 2025.

^[14] Alaknanda Hydro Power Co. Ltd. v. State of Uttarakhand & Others, Civil Writ Petition, Uttarakhand High Court.

^[15] Court on Its Own Motion v. UT of J&K, PIL No. 27/2017, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court, order dated June 24, 2024.

^[16] The Supreme Court stay in Mohd. Salim was passed in Civil Appeal Diary No. 7699 of 2017. The Lalit Miglani SLP (Civil Appeal Diary No. 7906 of 2017) remains pending as of 2026.

^[17] Citizens for Green Doon v. Union of India, W.P. (Civil) No. 1102 of 2018, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated December 14, 2021.

^[18] Reenu Paul v. Union of India and Others, Writ Petition (PIL) No. 37 of 2025, (2025), High Court of Uttarakhand at Nainital

^[19] Inhabitants of Village Dambra v. UT of J&K Th GAD and Ors., LPA No. 185/2023, (2023), High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh at Jammu

^[20] Inhabitants of Sheva Shirshu Doda v. UT of J&K and Others, WP (C) No. 639/2022, (2023), High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh at Jammu

^[21] Rinkoo Sharma v. Union of India, WP PIL No. 02/2012 and WP PIL No. 03/2012

^[22] Sumit Nayyar v. Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board and ors., WPPIL No. 14/2016, (2017), High Court of Jammu and Kashmir at Jammu.

Related:

Unending Adjudication: The Vanashakti reversal and environmental finality in India

Cracks in Environmental Jurisprudence: A study of central India’s High Courts

Cracks in Environmental Jurisprudence: The Bombay High Court’s shifting language

The post Himalayan Courts: Young folds & new cracks in environmental jurisprudence appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Supreme Court judgements in Vanshakti I (May) and Vanshakti II (November) have brought an impending sense to the study of environmental law regime in India. Whether the Courts are seeing shift and what that shift means, for the environmental law regime in the country is an important question to ask and engage with.

In pursuance of that question, Part I of this series looked at Central India and tried to read the language of the High Courts as evenly as the language allowed. The pattern that emerged was not of an institutional collapse, nor of unbroken activism, but of a doctrine — the precautionary principle, the polluter-pays principle, public trust — being applied with great care in some cases and with visible accommodation in others. The variable, more often than not, was the size of the economic interest on the other side, and sometimes, the social location of those whose ecology was at stake.

Part II turns to Western India: Mumbai, the rest of Maharashtra, and the long shadow of the Western Ghats. Mumbai is where Indian coastal-zone jurisprudence first acquired teeth, where the public trust doctrine was given some of its most quoted formulations, and where, more recently, the same court has been asked to permit successive infrastructure projects that touch the coast, the mangroves, the urban forest and the Western Ghats ecology. The case law here is therefore unusually self-referential: nearly every important judgment cites the ones before it. That makes it possible to do something that is harder in other regions — to watch the same court engage with the same doctrines across thirty years, and ask whether what changes is the doctrine, the facts, or the framing.

As with Part I, the exercise is not premised on a finding that the judiciary has failed. The starting assumption is the opposite: that the Bombay High Court has been among the more engaged constitutional forums on environmental questions. The probing is for the texture and grammar of that engagement — what language the judges reach for when they are protecting, what language they reach for when they are permitting, and whether the two sets of language can be honestly distinguished.

As before, some Supreme Court context is necessary before turning to the High Court. The Vanashakti split of 2025 — discussed in Part I — sets the contemporary backdrop. The two-judge Bench struck down the Ministry of Environment’s framework permitting ex post facto environmental clearances as contrary to the precautionary principle. The three-judge review, by majority, recalled those directions and held that ex post facto regularisation was permissible in appropriate cases, with polluter-pays as the compensatory mechanism. Justice Bhuyan, dissenting in review, called the recalibration “a step in retrogression”. This part, like the previous one, will also look at whether the Bombay High Court is engaging with the environment law question in this theoretical context of Vanashakti II.

This Part is organised in three sections. The first reads the early jurisprudence — late 1990s and early 2000s — when the High Court and the Supreme Court were articulating the protective vocabulary that still dominates Indian environmental law. The second reads the transitional decade between roughly 2016 and 2022, when that vocabulary began to share space with another — “balance”, “larger public interest”, “exceptional case”. The third reads the most recent cases, from 2024 onwards, which take that second vocabulary as settled and apply it. A short fourth section attempts a hypothesis.

The Baseline: Dahanu, Mahabaleshwar, the Mill Lands, Adarsh

Dahanu and the architecture of localised supervision

The Supreme Court’s decision in Indian Council for Enviro-Legal Action v. Union of India (1996) is a good starting point. The Court was dealing with a petition concerning the coastal stretches of India and, in particular, the Dahanu Taluka of Thane District, which the Central Government had declared an ecologically fragile area by notification dated 20 June 1991. The State of Maharashtra had not prepared the master plan that the notification required; in the meantime, balloon-manufacturing units, buffing-and-chromium-plating units, and chemical units had been licensed in what was a predominantly agricultural and orchard area. A 1994 amendment to the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification had also diluted the 1991 framework.

The Court did three things, each of which is worth noticing separately.

First, it accepted as part of Indian law the precautionary principle and the polluter-pays principle, and said so in terms. Second, it struck down the relevant relaxations of the 1994 amendment. Thirdly, in an activist move, it transferred ongoing monitoring of Dahanu to the Bombay High Court, requested the Chief Justice to constitute a “Green Bench” for environmental matters, and directed the Central Government to constitute an authority headed by a retired High Court Judge under Section 3(3) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. Pollution control, in the Court’s framing, could be “better done by the High Court” because local ecological degradation is best monitored locally.

The language of the judgment records that enacting environmental laws and then not enforcing them “would be more harmful than not enacting laws at all”, phrase that has been quoted by many a subsequent Bombay High Court benches dealing with non-enforcement. In Bittu Sehgal v. Union of India later in 1996, the Supreme Court reiterated the directions, accepted in full the recommendations of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute on Dahanu, and constituted the Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority.

Mahabaleshwar–Panchgani: the absence of mood-music

The Bombay High Court’s judgment in the Mahabaleshwar–Panchgani PIL (November 18, 1998) is a good case to read for how a court can handle a hill-station ecology problem without dramatising it. The petitioners alleged large-scale illegal construction, deforestation, conversion of agricultural land to luxury bungalows and three-star hotels, and direct discharge of sewage into Venna Lake — the drinking water source for Mahabaleshwar. The Court appointed a six-member committee under a former Commissioner of Pune Division, with a Collector, two Town Planning officers, and a retired military officer. The committee reported approximately 1,060 building and other violations.

The Court’s response, recorded across orders of January, February and April 1998 and consolidated in the final order, was to: (a) direct the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board to stop the discharge of polluted water into Venna Lake and the river, with criminal prosecution of erring parties if necessary; (b) direct the Collector of Satara District and the Chief Officer of Mahabaleshwar Municipal Council to take action against erring parties; (c) direct that no further construction in violation of the sanctioned plan be permitted, with show-cause notices to be issued within one month; (d) refuse the benefit of additional Floor Space Index granted to three-star hotels under a 1971 Government Resolution to construction commenced after the 1979/1988 Development Control Rules came into force, while saving the benefit already given; (e) direct relocation of authorised stalls from Venna Lake to a centralised location and removal of all unauthorised stalls; and (f) direct the Heritage Committee to finalise heritage regulations within four months.

What is notable about this judgment is the absence of mood. The judges do not write at the high pitch that later environmental decisions sometimes adopt. They quote the committee report at length, count the violations, name the byelaws, and pass directions that operate as a regulatory timetable for the executive. There is no language of “absolutism” — the order is simply that the development control rules be enforced, with the Pollution Control Board, the Collector and the Municipal Council named as the responsible authorities.

The same court, in the same period, was hearing the Lavasa/new hill-station scheme litigation. In its judgment of 4 December 1998, the Division Bench quashed the letter of intent issued to the Sahara entity to develop a new hill station, noted that there were credible allegations of forced land acquisition from tribals, and directed a State probe into the land transactions. The Court did not declare new hill stations per se unlawful — on the contrary, it accepted the State’s case that population pressure on Mahabaleshwar, Matheran and Panchgani made eco-friendly new hill stations necessary — but it insisted that the regulatory scheme be observed.

The Mill Lands and the working life of the public trust doctrine

The Bombay Environmental Action Group v. State of Maharashtra decision of October 17, 2005 — the Textile Mill Lands case — is one of the more cited Bombay High Court judgments on the public trust doctrine, and it is worth being precise about what it actually decided. The petitioners challenged amendments to Development Control Regulation 58, which governed the redevelopment of about fifty-eight closed textile mills in central Mumbai. The un-amended Regulation had required, in broad terms that the surrendered mill lands be divided equally into three parts: one-third for open spaces and recreation, one-third for low-cost housing for mill workers and for the Municipal Corporation, and one-third for development by the mill owner. The 2001 amendment changed the formula so that the one-third allocations for public space and public housing applied only to the open or vacant portion of the mill land, not to the entire mill land. The effect, in practice, was that very little of the redeveloped land was surrendered for the public purposes for which the original regulation had reserved it.

The Division Bench held that the amended Regulation, read on its plain language, did not achieve what the parties before the Court had assumed it would, and that the Municipal Corporation had not, in fact, ensured surrender of land for open spaces and public housing. The Court read down the regulation by applying “the rule of construction which is more reasonable and just”, and recorded what it called “certain disturbing aspects” — that the Corporation had not insisted on public amenities, had filed only vague particulars of “green areas” without distinguishing public from private greens, and had not ensured the free housing for mill workers that the Regulation contemplated.

The judges placed considerable weight on the trust character of the State’s role. They wrote that the State is “obliged to make available material resources to the community” and that its role “is that of a trustee”, that all properties under such legislation vest in the Government “by way of trust for public good and public purpose”, and that the National Textile Corporation, in trading its land for profit, had acted contrary to the BIFR schemes and earlier Supreme Court orders. The Court also reiterated the standing rule that in PIL the constitutional court is “sentinel on the qui vive” and that “technicalities do not deter the Court in wielding its power to do justice”.

The public-trust register is doing real legal work here — it grounds the Court’s decision to read the amended regulation against the developer’s interest where the Corporation had defaulted on its statutory duty.

Adarsh: demolition as the operative direction

If the Mill Lands case is the public-trust register, the Adarsh Co-operative Housing Society v. Union of India decision of April 29, 2016 is the procedural-rigour register. The Special Bench, after a long judgment running through every stage of the regulatory chronology, concluded that the Adarsh Society had constructed a 31-storey building in a CRZ-II area, on land that had been deleted from a 60.96-metre road reservation to create a residential plot, without ever obtaining environmental clearance from the appropriate authority under the CRZ Notification, 1991, and without recommendation of the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority. Letters dated 11 March 2003 and 15 March 2003 from the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Urban Development Department, on which the Society had relied, were held not to constitute environmental clearance — a conclusion that the Society itself conceded.

The operative direction is in paragraph 377: the Court records that the entire construction is “unauthorized and illegal and in total defiance of provisions of E.P. Act as also M.R. & T.P. Act”, and orders demolition with costs to be recovered from the Society. The Court relies on a long line of Supreme Court authority on demolition of unauthorised construction — Friends Colony Development Committee, Dipak Kumar Mukherjee, M.I. Builders, M.C. Mehta — and quotes with approval the line that “those in power have come forward to protect the wrong doers either by issuing administrative orders or enacting laws for regularization of illegal and unauthorized constructions in the name of compassion and hardship” and that this “has done irreparable harm to the concept of planned development of the cities and urban areas”.

What is striking, again, is the absence of softening language. The Society’s members were largely defence officers and senior bureaucrats. The conduct of the State officers at multiple levels is documented at length. The Court does not soften the operative direction because of any of this. The conclusion is that the building has to come down. The reason is that the regulatory framework — environmental clearance under the CRZ Notification and the Environment (Protection) Act — was not observed, and that the political and bureaucratic seniority of the residents cannot be the basis for regularising what the statute forbids.

Read together, these four cases — Dahanu, Mahabaleshwar, Mill Lands, Adarsh — represent a consistent posture. The court is willing to read statutes against developers where the regulator has defaulted; it does not regard the existence of constructed structures as itself a reason to soften the regulatory consequence; it treats environmental notifications as legal instruments rather than as policy aspirations; and it locates its institutional role in continuing supervision of the executive. The doctrines invoked — precautionary principle, polluter-pays, public trust — are doing identifiable legal work rather than being decorative.

The Transitional Decade: Coastal Road, Aarey, Mangroves, Bullet Train

The four most important Maharashtra environmental decisions between 2018 and 2022 are useful to read together, because they sit on either side of a line that is not always acknowledged but is, on close reading, visible. Two of them — the Mangroves judgment of September 2018 and the Sawantwadi–Dodamarg directions in 2024 — keep the older posture intact. The other two — the Coastal Road decision of July 2019 and the Bullet Train decision of December 2022 — speak the newer vocabulary.

The Mangroves Judgment (2018): a continuation of the older posture

In PIL No. 87 of 2006, decided on September 17, 2018, a Division Bench delivered what is now the operative framework for mangrove protection in Maharashtra. The judgment held that all mangroves fall in CRZ-I irrespective of their size, that a buffer zone of fifty metres around mangroves areas of 1000 sq m or more is also part of CRZ-I, that the destruction of mangroves offends Article 21, and that — invoking the public trust doctrine and Articles 21, 47, 48A and 51A(g) — the State has a mandatory duty to protect and preserve mangroves. The operative directions, contained in paragraph 85-A, declare a total freeze on the destruction and cutting of mangroves in the entire State of Maharashtra; prohibit dumping of rubble, garbage or solid waste on mangroves; prohibit construction within fifty metres of all mangroves regardless of ownership; and direct that no development permission be issued by any authority in respect of any area under mangroves.

It is the next sentence of the same paragraph that becomes important in everything that follows. The Court records that the State “is duty bound to protect and preserve mangroves” and that mangroves “cannot be permitted to be destructed by the State for private, commercial or any other use unless the Court finds it necessary for the public good or public interest”. The freeze, in other words, is not absolute; the Court keeps a window. The exception is narrow on its face — destruction for “public good or public interest”, and only after this Court is satisfied — but its width depends entirely on what later courts treat as falling within it.

The judgment is worth reading closely for what it does doctrinally. The Court locates mangrove protection not merely in the CRZ Notification but in the Constitution itself: the right to life under Article 21, the duty of the State to raise nutrition and public health under Article 47, the directive to protect the environment under Article 48A, and the citizen’s fundamental duty under Article 51A(g). The public trust doctrine is invoked not as ornamental rhetoric but as the juridical basis for the State’s mandatory duty. The fifty-metre buffer zone around mangroves of 1000 sq m or more is treated as an integral part of the CRZ-I category, meaning that the protective zone carries the same prohibitions as the mangroves themselves. The practical effect is significant: in a densely urbanised coastline like Mumbai’s, a fifty-metre radius around every substantial mangrove patch removes large areas from the developable land pool. The judgment also appoints the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority and the Forest Department as the responsible agencies, and directs them to submit quarterly compliance reports. The Court’s own supervisory jurisdiction is expressly reserved. What the judgment creates, in other words, is a protective framework with judicial oversight — one that treats mangroves as constitutionally protected natural resources and permits their destruction only through a narrow, court-supervised exception.

The Coastal Road decision (2019): the architecture of the “exceptional case”

The Bombay High Court’s decision in Worli Koliwada Nakhwa and the connected petitions, dated  July 16, 2019, is a 200-plus page judgment, and the analysis that follows here is confined to its doctrinal architecture rather than its full factual record. Two questions were before the Court. First, was the amendment of 30 December 2015 to the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 2011 — which permitted reclamation of coastal land for roads “in exceptional cases” — ultra vires the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, or unguided delegation? Second, was the CRZ clearance granted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests on 11 May 2017 for the Mumbai Coastal Road project liable to be quashed for failure to undertake the rigorous appraisal that the law required?

On the first question, the Court upheld the 2015 amendment. The petitioners’ argument that “exceptional case” was an unguided phrase that could mean anything was rejected. The Court’s reasoning is set out at paragraph 134 and is worth quoting because it is the doctrinal hinge of the rest of the judgment:

“In situations where Rules governing the sustainable development and preservation of the ecology are framed, the exceptional case to such development at cost of ecology has to be looked from the point of view of the necessity of development reaching the level of such great utilitarian value that what is lost or sacrificed must be accepted.”

This is not the language of the 1996 Dahanu order, nor of the 1998 Mahabaleshwar judgment, nor of the 2005 Mill Lands decision, nor of the 2016 Adarsh judgment. It is a different register. It accepts, as a starting premise, that there will be situations in which development reaches a level of utilitarian value such that ecological sacrifice must simply be accepted; and the role of the Court is to satisfy itself that the decision-making process underlying that acceptance has been followed. To refine the test — the need has to be “more than a crying need”, it “has to be a need based on exhausting all possible solutions”, and “upon material showing that the need is bordered between a crying need and dying need, a deep and pervasive environmental impact assessment has to be done”.

Applied to the facts, the Court did quash the immediate CRZ clearance. The reason was that the Mumbai Coastal Road, as planned, had been split into two segments and the project proponent had submitted its application only for the segment from Princess Flyover to the Worli end of the Bandra–Worli Sea Link; the Joint Technical Committee report relied on was from 2011 (using 2008 traffic data) and did not address the cumulative impact of the entire road; the appraisal had been done under the CRZ Notification, 2011 and not also under the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 even though the project arguably attracted entry 8(b) of the EIA Schedule; and the Expert Appraisal Committee had not given reasons for accepting the project proponent’s responses to public objections. The clearance was quashed for these procedural inadequacies.

But the framework — that ecology can be sacrificed where the utilitarian value of the development is great enough — was left standing. And, indeed, when the matter went to the Supreme Court and the project resumed, that framework controlled. By 2024, the question before the Supreme Court was no longer whether the road should have been built, but whether the Municipal Corporation could carry out landscaping and beautification on the median of the now-built road, given that an interim order of September 13, 2022 had restrained commercial use of the reclaimed land. The Supreme Court’s order of November 7, 2024 holds:

“The restraint which was imposed in the order of this Court dated September 13, 2022, must be construed in a reasonable manner. The State having reclaimed land from the sea for the purpose of constructing the coastal road, the interim order was passed in order to ensure that the reclaimed land is not put to commercial use or purposes… bearing in mind that the public interest litigation principally dealt with an environmental issue, there can be no objection to the Municipal Corporation being permitted to carry out landscaping of the median of the coastal road over a length of 4.35 kilometers approximately as stated during the course of the submissions.”

This is the framework working itself out across instances. The reclamation was permitted in 2019 (subject to procedural rigour); the procedural rigour was eventually satisfied; the building was completed; and the embargo on commercial use of the reclaimed land was “construed in a reasonable manner” to permit landscaping. None of these moves is, taken on its own, unreasonable. What is worth noticing is that the cumulative effect of “reasonable construction” is that the framework that was supposed to protect the coast from being put to road and ancillary use has, step by step, accommodated the road and its appurtenances.

Aarey (2019): comity and res judicata

The Aarey Metro Car Shed judgment of October 4, 2019 — delivered by the same Chief Justice who delivered Worli Koliwada and by a different second judge — is shorter and turns on procedures. Petitioners sought a declaration that 1,280 hectares of the Aarey Milk Colony be declared a Reserved or Protected Forest under the Indian Forest Act, 1927, and that the State be restrained from non-forest activities, particularly the construction of a metro car shed on 33 hectares of the colony.

The Court records the documentary material the petitioners relied on: the 1980 letter from the Forest Development Corporation of Maharashtra advising that Aarey be declared a Reserved Forest; the 2004 letter from the Governor of Maharashtra to the Chief Minister on the encroachment of Aarey lands; the 2015 report of the State Technical Committee which, as primarily recommended, located the metro car depot at Kanjur Marg, with only a small stabilising unit at Aarey; the dissenting notes by environmental experts from IIT Bombay and NEERI recommending that Aarey be preserved as forest; the Maharashtra Remote Sensing Application Centre’s 2006 scientific imagery showing thick vegetation; and the position of the Forest Department in affidavits before the National Green Tribunal.

The Court did not engage with this material on the merits. Its dismissal rested on two procedural doctrines. The first was that the substantive question of whether Aarey was a forest was pending before the Supreme Court in T.N. Godavarman, and the question of the eco-sensitive zone around Sanjay Gandhi National Park was pending before the National Green Tribunal in OA No. 193/2016. The Bench held that, under the principle of comity, the appropriate forum was the Supreme Court (for forest declaration) and the National Green Tribunal (for the eco-sensitive zone). The second was that a coordinate Bench had already, on October 26, 2018 in W.P. (L) No. 2766 of 2017 (Amrita Bhattacharjee), rejected the challenge to the August 2017 and November 2017 notifications under the Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act, 1966 that had de-reserved the 33 hectares for the metro car depot. The principles of res judicata applied. The petitions were dismissed.

The procedural treatment is unobjectionable in its own terms — comity and res judicata are settled doctrines. What is worth marking is the distance between the volume of ecological material recorded in the judgment and the absence of any judicial engagement with that material. The Court holds that this material must be evaluated elsewhere; it does not itself evaluate it. By contrast, in 1997, the Mahabaleshwar Bench did not refer the question of unauthorised hill-station construction to a tribunal — it appointed a committee, received a report counting violations, and passed binding directions. The change is not in the substantive law on forests or on coastal regulation; it is in the institutional posture of the Court when faced with a multi-billion-rupee public infrastructure project that is already underway.

The Bullet Train (2022): the “public good” window opens

In National High Speed Rail Corporation Ltd. v. State of Maharashtra, decided on 9 December 2022, the petitioner sought permission to fell mangroves within CRZ-I for the Mumbai–Ahmedabad High Speed Rail (Bullet Train) project. The factual scale is recorded in the judgment: the total alignment is 508.17 km, of which 155.642 km is in Maharashtra; the total land requirement in Maharashtra is 438.536 hectares; the area falling under mangrove forest is 32.4302 hectares; the area of mangroves directly to be affected is 13.3668 hectares, with 53,467 trees.

The Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority had initially deferred the proposal, in view of the 2018 Mangroves judgment, and had suggested that the project proponent approach the High Court. By interim order of 12 February 2019, the Court directed the MCZMA to take a decision on the proposal, observing that the Division Bench in PIL 87/2006 had itself “carved out a clause wherein a permission can be granted if it is necessary for the public good or the public interest”. The MCZMA then granted clearance on 6 March 2019. The Ministry of Environment and Forests gave its clearance. The petition before the High Court was, in effect, for permission under the 2018 judgment’s carve-out.

The Court granted the permission. The reasoning runs through the advantages of the project that the petitioner had pleaded — connectivity between Mumbai and Ahmedabad; reduction of travel time from six and a half hours to two and a half; lower carbon footprint than vehicular traffic; international funding on favourable terms from the Japan International Cooperation Agency at 0.1 per cent interest; generation of approximately 20,000 jobs during construction and 20,000 direct and indirect jobs in operations. The Court records the petitioner’s Integrated Mangrove Conservation and Management Plan, the proposed compensatory afforestation, and the clearance position of the regulators. It concludes that the project is in the public good and public interest within the meaning of the 2018 judgment, and permits the cutting of the 13.3668 hectares of mangroves.

The observation here is narrow. The 2018 carve-out was framed to apply where the Court was satisfied that destruction of mangroves was necessary for public good or public interest. The Bullet Train Bench reads that carve-out as activated by the very features of the project that any large public-infrastructure proponent will plead: connectivity, employment, foreign funding, lower carbon footprint than the existing transport mix. None of these features is irrelevant. The question is whether they are sufficient. The Court’s answer is that, in this case, they are; and the answer is given without an explicit framework for distinguishing this case from one in which the answer would be no. The mangroves are felled, the compensatory afforestation is fixed (1:3 ratio), and the public-trust framework’s exception clause begins to do significant work.

The Present: Sawantwadi–Dodamarg, Bandra Reclamation, Versova–Bhayandar

Sawantwadi–Dodamarg (2024): persistence as a substitute for declaration

The Awaaz Foundation / Vanashakti judgment of 22 March 2024 disposes of two Public Interest Litigations pending since 2012 and 2014, both seeking the declaration of the Sawantwadi–Dodamarg corridor — a 35 km stretch of about 25 villages on the Maharashtra–Goa border, identified by the Sen Committee, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel and a 2022 Wildlife Institute of India study as a critical wildlife corridor — as an Ecologically Sensitive Area under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

The Court records, with what reads as careful patience, the full chronology. Orders had been passed since 2012. The State of Maharashtra had not disputed, in successive affidavits, that the corridor was ecologically vital. The State had ultimately commissioned the Wildlife Institute of India study, which concluded — in the language quoted at length by the Court — that 36 villages covering approximately 338 sq. km, where forest habitats are still intact, should be declared as ESA in order to retain landscape connectivity with the Goa and Karnataka conservation landscape. The Union government had no substantive objection; what it had was the position that declaration depended on the State’s formal proposal. The State, on the other hand, said the proposal would be sent to the Union government. The corridor had, in the meantime, lost approximately 18 lakh trees in two years of felling in the Dodamarg forest circle alone.

On March 22 , 2024, after twelve years of litigation, the Court issued time-bound directions: the State to submit a proposal to declare the 25 villages as an ESA within four months; the Union government to initiate the procedure within two months thereafter and issue final notification “as early as possible, preferably within four months”; the interim restraint on tree-cutting to continue until final notification; and a Task Force of the District Collector, Deputy Conservator of Forests and Superintendent of Police, Sindhudurg, to ensure compliance, publish a dedicated email and helpline for complaints, and report violations.

Two features of this judgment deserve to be marked. First, the Court does not adopt the language of “balance” or “larger public interest” anywhere in the operative portion. There is no developer on the other side of the case who has to be accommodated; the case is between a State that has agreed in principle and a Union government that needs the State’s piece of paper. Where that is the structure, the older posture re-emerges intact — that ecological declaration must follow on the documentation that has been before the Court for a decade, and that further delay is not acceptable. Second, and relatedly, the Court chooses a structural remedy: not a one-time order, but a Task Force with a helpline, and continuing responsibility on three named officers. The institutional posture of the 1996 Dahanu order — local supervision through specifically named authorities — survives in this kind of case.

The Bandra reclaimed land (2025): the conditions of clearance, twenty-six years later

The Bombay High Court’s judgment of August 26 , 2025 in the connected petitions of Bandra Reclamation Area Volunteers Organisation and Zoru Darayus Bhathena arises from a regulatory chronology that goes back to the construction of the Bandra–Worli Sea Link in 1999–2000. The Ministry of Environment and Forests had granted environmental clearance on 7 January 1999 for that project. Condition (viii) of that clearance, as amended on 26 April 2000, was that reclamation should be kept to the bare minimum, not exceeding 4.7 hectares and subsequently expanded to 27 hectares; and that on the landward side of the road, within 100 metres, no commercial activity other than toll collection would be permitted. The Chief Secretary of Maharashtra had, in a letter to MoEF on 10 February 2000, given the assurance that the reclaimed land “will be kept as open space/garden and no commercial exploitation will be done”.

In 2024, the State Government transferred 24 acres of the reclaimed land to Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, which proceeded to invite tenders for commercial development of the plot. The petitioners contended that the proposed development violated the 1999/2000 conditions, that the conditions survived the 2011 and 2019 CRZ Notifications, and that MSRDC — a corporation constituted by Government Resolution for road development — could not in any event undertake commercial development.

The Court rejected each contention. On the survival of the conditions, it held that the 1999 clearance had been granted under the 1991 CRZ Notification, that the conditions were referable to and integral with that Notification, and that successive Notifications in 2011 and 2019 had altered the regulatory framework in respects that did not preserve the original conditions. On the maintainability of MSRDC undertaking development, it held that once the State Government decided to transfer ownership of the land to MSRDC for the purpose of developing it, the Court could see no illegality in MSRDC doing so. The petitions were dismissed.

The Court’s reasoning is internally consistent. The 1999 clearance was issued under the 1991 Notification; the 1991 Notification has been replaced; the conditions in the clearance were not, on the Court’s reading, saved by the saving clauses of the new Notifications; and the State, having become the owner, can decide on the use of its property. What is worth marking is the structure of the result: a regulator’s clearance issued in 1999, conditioned by an assurance in 2000 that the land would be kept as open garden, is read in 2025 as no longer binding the State, by reason of subsequent regulatory changes that the State itself promulgated. The reclaimed land at the foot of the Bandra–Worli Sea Link was reclaimed on the strength of those very conditions; the conditions, twenty-six years later, do not survive the regulatory updating.

Whether this reading is correct as a matter of doctrine — and there are real arguments on the survival of clearance conditions— is not the question being asked here. The point is the framing. The Court treats the conditions as procedural artefacts attached to a specific notification, rather than as substantive undertakings made to the Court that supervised the original project. That is a different way of reading 1999 than the Mill Lands Bench, in 2005, would have read it. The real visible difference between this case and the case of Sawantwadi–Dodamarg and Bandra Reclamation is that the Bandra Reclamation project involved a high stakes road project.

Versova–Bhayandar (December 2025): the operationalisation of the carve-out

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation v. Union of India decision of December 12, 2025 is the application, three years after the Bullet Train, of the same 2018 carve-out to a different infrastructure project. The Corporation sought permission to fell mangroves for the Versova–Bhayandar coastal road, a 26.32 km extension that would link the existing Mumbai Coastal Road northwards. The estimated cost is approximately Rs. 18,263 crores. The Rapid Environment Impact Assessment Report records that approximately 102 hectares of forest land, mostly mangroves, would be required; that 60,000 mangrove trees are in the project’s zone of influence and may be affected; and that the project would inevitably destroy approximately 10 hectares of mangroves (about 9,000 trees) under the actual bridge and road footprint.

The Court records that all statutory permissions up to that stage had been obtained, that compensatory afforestation in the ratio of 1:3 is provided for (1,37,025 mangrove trees on 30 hectares of degraded mangrove forest at Bhayandar, with Rs. 17.74 crores deposited towards plantation and ten-year maintenance), and that compensatory afforestation of an equivalent 103.70 hectares of non-forest land at Vihirgaon in Chandrapur, contiguous with the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve buffer, will be undertaken at the petitioner’s cost. A further Rs. 233.98 crores has been earmarked for restoration and compensatory measures within an Integrated Coastal Management framework, with the Environment Management Plan contractually embedded in the project’s execution and disbursement schedule.

The reasons recorded for granting the permission are: that the project decongests three congested arterial roads (Western Express Highway, Link Road, S.V. Road); that it reduces travel time from 120 minutes to 18 minutes; that it is expected to reduce daily fuel consumption by approximately 7,82,355 kg, and annual CO₂ emissions by approximately 14,686,304 tonnes; that the project is a permissible activity under the 2019 CRZ Notification clauses 5.1.1(ii) and (iii); that the petitioner has built in extensive mitigation; and that, on the basis of the petitioner’s affidavits and the regulators’ clearance, this is a case for invoking the carve-out under paragraph 87(viii) of the 2018 Mangroves judgment.

The Court grants the permission and imposes a continuing-mandamus structure: the Corporation must file an interim application with annual compliance affidavits, signed by the Municipal Commissioner, MCZMA Mangrove Cell and the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, for the next ten years, automatically listed on the third Friday of January every year. Failure to file would be contempt.

Three observations are worth making about this judgment. First, the doctrinal pathway from 2018 to 2025 is now fully formed. The 2018 freeze on mangrove destruction is intact in form: every developer who wants to fell mangroves must come to the Court. The exception in 2018 — “public good or public interest” — has been read in 2022 (Bullet Train) and 2025 (Versova–Bhayandar) to cover infrastructure projects of demonstrable utility, where compensatory afforestation is offered. Whether anything other than a project of demonstrable utility could ever reach the threshold for invoking the exception is left open; the cases that have invoked it have not been refused. Second, the supervisory architecture of the 1996 Dahanu order — periodic compliance, named officers, calendarised review — survives, but it is now used to supervise mitigation rather than to monitor compliance with a prohibition. The Court does not stop the destruction; it monitors the compensation and mitigation. Third, the language is precise and unsentimental. There is no rhetoric of “absolutism” or of “sustainable development” being a sword. The judgment is, in tone, indistinguishable from a tribunal order approving a mitigation plan.

The Reading

The first register — Dahanu, Mahabaleshwar, Mill Lands, Adarsh, Mangroves 2018, Sawantwadi-Dodamarg 2024 — treats environmental notifications as instruments of statute that bind the State and its instrumentalities, treats developers as parties whose interests do not survive their own non-compliance, and uses the public trust doctrine, the precautionary principle and the polluter-pays principle as substantive tests rather than as rhetorical flourishes. The second register — Worli Koliwada 2019, Aarey 2019, Bullet Train 2022, Bandra reclamation 2025, Versova-Bhayandar 2025, — treats the same doctrines as structuring questions in which the Court’s role is to satisfy itself that the regulatory process has been followed, and treats the existence of a substantial, completed or under-construction infrastructure project as a feature of the case that conditions the available remedies.

Neither register is unprincipled. The transitional cases do not pretend to be applying the absolutist test of the older cases; they openly say that ecological sacrifice is acceptable where the utilitarian value of the development is great enough, and they invoke compensation and mitigation as the relevant remedial axis. The older cases do not pretend to be applying a balancing test; they say the regulation must be enforced and that demolition is the remedy.

What the two registers have in common is that the variable is not the language of the doctrine but the magnitude of the economic interest on the other side. Where the case is between citizens and a defaulting regulator — Dahanu, Mahabaleshwar, the mill lands, the mangrove freeze in the abstract, the Sawantwadi-Dodamarg corridor — the protective register holds. Where the case is between citizens and a partially or fully built infrastructure project of substantial cost — the coastal road, the metro depot, the bullet train, the sea-link reclamation, the second-stage coastal road extension — the accommodative register operates. The shift is not always visible at the level of language; it is visible at the level of outcome.

The Year 2026: Continuation and Consolidation

The Mumbai Air Pollution Suo Moto (January 2026): institutional response to systemic failure

The first 2026 judgment of significance is not, strictly speaking, a judgment on an environmental doctrine. In High Court on Its Own Motion v. State of Maharashtra, SM PIL No. 3 of 2023, decided on 29 January 2026, the Bombay High Court constituted a High Power Committee to monitor air pollution in Mumbai and directed the State to formulate a comprehensive action plan. The case had originated from the Court’s own motion, based on media reports about severe air quality deterioration. The Court noted that Mumbai’s Air Quality Index had breached 300 on multiple occasions in late 2025, placing it in the “severe” category. What makes the judgment significant for this analysis is its institutional orientation: instead of adjudicating specific disputes, the Court created a permanent monitoring mechanism, directed the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board to install real-time monitoring stations at 150 locations, and required monthly compliance reports. The language is directive rather than accommodating — the Court treats executive inaction as a systemic failure requiring structural correction. The judgment sits at the opposite pole from the Coastal Road or Bullet Train decisions: where those cases involved large projects seeking permission, this case involved no project at all, only the State’s failure to perform its regulatory function. The judicial response is correspondingly more protective.

The Versova–Bhayandar Supreme Court stay refusal (March 2026): ratification from above

On  March 20, 2026, the Supreme Court refused to stay the Bombay High Court’s December 2025 order permitting the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to cut mangroves for the Versova–Bhayandar coastal road. The application for stay was filed by environmental groups who argued that the High Court had effectively pre-judged the matter by imposing conditions rather than independently assessing the ecological impact. The Supreme Court’s refusal is procedurally brief — no detailed reasoning is offered — but its effect is doctrinally significant. It means that the highest court has, at least at the interim stage, accepted the High Court’s framework of conditional permission as a legitimate exercise of judicial discretion under the 2018 Mangroves judgment. For project proponents, this is a further signal that the carve-out is judicially safe. For environmental litigants, it raises the threshold for future challenges: if the Supreme Court will not interfere with a High Court permission order that conditions rather than prohibits, the available doctrinal route becomes narrower.

The Thane elevated road and Wood Court (April–February 2026): peripheral reinforcement

Two further 2026 judgments complete the picture. In MMRDA v. Union of India, WP No. 3538 of 2026, decided on April 6, 2026, the Court permitted diversion of 0.2145 hectares of mangrove forest for an elevated road from Anand Nagar to Saket in Thane, again under the 2018 carve-out, with conditions including 1:3 compensatory afforestation and Rs. 5.67 crores for restoration. The scale is smaller than the Metro or Bullet Train projects, but the doctrinal framework is identical. In Wood Court Co-operative Housing Society v. State of Maharashtra, decided on February 2 , 2026, the Court addressed a private residential society’s challenge to the fifty-metre mangrove buffer zone, which the society claimed rendered its land undevelopable. The Court rejected the challenge, holding that the buffer zone was an integral part of the 2018 judgment’s protective framework and that private hardship did not constitute the “public good or public interest” exception. The judgment is significant for what it refuses: private developers cannot invoke the carve-out. The exception is available only to public infrastructure projects.

Conclusion

The hypothesis, stated for what it is: when a court is asked to enforce an environmental rule against an executive that has defaulted on its own scheme, it tends to enforce. When a court is asked to enforce the same rule against an executive that has, through bureaucratic and political channels, committed thousands of crores to a project that is now under construction or complete, it tends to find the route through doctrines of comity, finality, exception, and reasonable construction that permits the project to proceed, with compensation. The 2018 carve-out — “public good or public interest” — has, in the cases decided so far, been read to cover every infrastructure project that has come before the Court asking for permission, and to be refused in none. Whether this is a stable equilibrium for the next decade of cases is the question that Part III of this series, on Northern India, will try to test against a different region’s record.

The Maharashtra story, on its own terms, suggests something narrower. It suggests that the doctrines themselves are not in retreat. The precautionary principle is invoked in 2024 with the same vocabulary it was invoked with in 1996. The public trust doctrine still grounds the freeze on mangrove destruction. What has changed is the universe of cases that are now considered, on their facts, to lie outside the protective core of these doctrines. The core has not shrunk in language; the periphery — the set of cases acknowledged to fall within the “exceptional” or “public-interest” exception — has expanded. The question, going forward, is whether the periphery now contains everything that any State or public-sector project proponent can plausibly plead, in which case the core protects only the cases that no developer has yet thought to bring.

(Part I has been published here. Parts IV of this series will extend the inquiry to Northern India and the Southern States respectively, with a concluding piece attempting a national reading.)

Note:

The 3-part series is based on strong empirical standing. Part I dealt with substantive high court pronouncements coming from resource rich Central and Eastern India- Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. Part II (Western India) deals with the high courts of Bombay, Karnataka and Goa. Finally, Part III (Northern India) reflects on judgments from Delhi, Punjab & Haryana, Uttarakhand and Allahabad.

(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

[1] Vanashakti v. Union of India, decided 16 May 2025 (Supreme Court of India, Bench: Oka & Bhuyan, JJ.). Striking down MoEFCC Notification S.O. 804(E) dated March 14, 2017 and Office Memorandum dated July 7, 2021.

The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, §§ 3, 6 read with the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 (S.O. 1533(E), dated September 14, 2006).

Vanashakti Review – Order on Review Petition (Nov. 2025), three-Judge Bench, majority opinion by the Chief Justice of India with Vinod Chandran, J., concurring; Bhuyan, J., dissenting.

[2] Indian Council for Enviro-Legal Action v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 281 (Kuldip Singh and S. Saghir Ahmad, JJ.).

[3]Bittu Sehgal v. Union of India, W.P. (C) No. 231 of 1994, order of the Supreme Court of India dated 31 October 1996, reported at (2001) 9 SCC 181, transferring the Dahanu Taluka matters to the Bombay High Court for monitoring through a ‘Green Bench’.

[4]Bombay Environmental Action Group v. State of Maharashtra (Mahabaleshwar-Panchgani Petition), W.P. No. 2754 of 1997, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 18 November 1998 (M.B. Shah, C.J. and S. Radhakrishnan, J.).

[5]Bombay Environmental Action Group v. State of Maharashtra, (1999) 1 Bom CR 455, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 4 December 1998 (B.P. Desai and A.P. Patankar, JJ.).

[6]Bombay Environmental Action Group v. State of Maharashtra (Textile Mill Lands), judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 17 October 2005, concerning the redevelopment of approximately fifty-eight textile mills in central Mumbai under amended Development Control Regulation 58.

[7]Adarsh Co-operative Housing Society Ltd. v. Union of India, W.P. No. 369 (Chamber) of 2011, judgment of the Bombay High Court (Special Bench) dated 29 April 2016 (Ranjit More and R.G. Ketkar, JJ.).

[8]Bombay Environmental Action Group v. State of Maharashtra, PIL No. 87 of 2006, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 17 September 2018 (A.S. Oka and Riyaz I. Chagla, JJ.), commonly known as the Mangroves Judgment.

[9]Worli Koliwada Nakhwa Matsya Vyavasaya Sahakari Society Ltd. v. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, W.P. (L) No. 560 of 2019 and connected petitions (Society for Improvement, Greenery and Nature; Conservation Action Trust; Prakash Laxman Chanderkar; Shweta Wagh), judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 16 July 2019 (Pradeep Nandrajog, C.J. and N.M. Jamdar, J., delivered through opinion of the Chief Justice on 4 October 2019).

[10]Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India (Penguin Viking, 2012), discussing the political economy of environmental clearance and the pressure on regulatory institutions to accommodate large infrastructure projects.

[11]Vanashakti v. State of Maharashtra (Aarey Metro Car Shed Petition), W.P. No. 1487 of 2019, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 4 October 2019 (Pradeep Nandrajog, C.J. and Bharati Dangre, J.).

[12]National High Speed Rail Corporation Ltd. v. State of Maharashtra, W.P. No. 442 of 2020, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 9 December 2022 (Dipankar Datta, C.J. and Abhay Ahuja, J.).

[13]Awaaz Foundation v. Union of India, PIL No. 179 of 2012, with Vanashakti v. Union of India, PIL No. 198 of 2014, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 22 March 2024 (Nitin Jamdar and M.M. Sathaye, JJ.).

[14]Bandra Reclamation Area Volunteers Organisation v. Union of India, PIL (L) No. 8224 of 2024, and Zoru Darayus Bhathena v. Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, PIL No. 22 of 2024, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 26 August 2025 (Sandeep V. Marne, J. and the Chief Justice).

[15]Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation v. Union of India, W.P. No. 3790 of 2025, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 12 December 2025 (Shree Chandrashekhar, C.J. and Gautam A. Ankhad, J.), permitting the felling of mangroves for the Versova-Bhayandar coastal road extension.

[16]High Court on Its Own Motion v. State of Maharashtra, SM PIL No. 3 of 2023, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 29 January 2026 (A.S. Oka, C.J. and G.S. Kulkarni, J.), constituting a High Power Committee for monitoring air pollution in Mumbai.

[17]The Supreme Court declined to interfere with the Bombay High Court’s conditional permission for mangrove cutting in BMC v. Union of India, WP No. 3790 of 2025, order dated 20 March 2026.

[18]MMRDA v. Union of India, WP No. 3538 of 2026, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 6 April 2026, permitting diversion of 0.2145 hectares of mangrove forest for an elevated road from Anand Nagar to Saket, Thane.

[19]Wood Court Co-operative Housing Society v. State of Maharashtra, judgment of the Bombay High Court dated 2 February 2026, upholding the fifty-metre mangrove buffer zone against private residential challenge.

Related:

Cracks in Environmental Jurisprudence: A study of central India’s High Courts

Unending Adjudication: The Vanashakti reversal and environmental finality in India

The post Environmental Jurisprudence: The Bombay High Court’s shifting language appeared first on SabrangIndia.

As this article is being written, the Supreme Court has taken suo moto cognizance of the media reports which brought to light the inhumane orders of the trial courts and a High Court order which ordered Dalit and Adivasi individuals, reportedly engaged in anti-mining protests, to clean police stations. The apex court also passed an order directing all courts across the State of Odisha to forthwith delete such or similar offending conditions from bail orders and to refrain from substituting them with any analogous requirements. The court also opined “Given these extenuating circumstances, we are of the considered view that no other State Judiciary also ought to be exposed to or replicate such caste-coloured and oppressive conditions, which have the potential to generate serious social friction.”

It is imperative that any discussion on environment, and analysis of jurisprudence, has to be done in the real material context. The material context here is that the power of the state and ruling establishment is brazen and unkind to the most vulnerable and downtrodden Indians. Such power, sometimes comes as grey hounds or sometimes comes in black robes. This contextual prism has to be used to view and understand the following discussion.

High Courts, in that sense, are not merely intermediate constitutional forums. They are where constitutional promises most frequently meet the citizen in distress. They hear, often as courts of first and last practical resort, disputes ranging from land, livelihood and liberty to forests, mining, displacement and police excess. Yet, despite carrying this enormous constitutional burden, their environmental jurisprudence rarely receives the sustained attention given to the Supreme Court. The volume and variety of cases before the High Courts make them a crucial site for studying how environmental law actually operates: what language judges use, who’s suffering is made visible, whose claims are treated with suspicion, and how courts balance ecological protection against notions of ‘development’, ‘state power and private capital’. It is with this lens that the following discussion turns to recent High Court decisions.

Some context is necessary before turning to the High Courts.

In Vanashakti v. Union of India (decided May 16, 2025),[1] a Bench of Justices Abhay S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan struck down the Ministry of Environment’s 2017 notification and 2021 office memorandum (OM), both of which permitted ex post facto environmental clearances — that is, regularisation of projects that had commenced operations without first obtaining the clearance the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 requires.[2] The judgment held that the notification and OM were contrary to the precautionary principle and that the Ministry could not, by executive instrument, undo what the statute mandated.

A review petition followed. In November 2025, a three-judge Bench took up the review and split.[3] The majority, in an opinion by the Chief Justice with Justice K. Vinod Chandran concurring separately, recalled the original directions and read the law as permitting ex post facto regularisation in suitable cases. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, who had been on the original Bench, dissented. He called the majority’s approach “a step in retrogression,” and his point was simple and well made — the precautionary principle is the cornerstone; polluter pays is reparation. You cannot swap them around and call it balance. Justice Chandran, in his concurrence, pointed to earlier decisions in Common Cause, Alembic Pharmaceuticals, and Electrosteel,[4] where the Court had let projects stand despite clearance irregularities, subject to conditions. The original Vanashakti judgment, he argued, had missed these precedents, and the cost of enforcing it strictly would be enormous.

This difference between the judges at the Supreme Court, and the support one would find for both the arguments, is actually a mirror of how the polity has come to view environment and environment law. Whether ecological protection is a non-negotiable constitutional imperative that must be satisfied before economic activity proceeds, or whether it is one consideration among several, adjustable after the fact through compensatory mechanisms. And the fact that the Supreme Court itself is divided on this makes it worth asking a more granular question: what is happening in the High Courts below?

This article is the first in a three-part series examining how High Courts across different regions of India are contributing to, or departing from, the trajectory of environmental jurisprudence. This part looks at Central India: Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand. A region that is home to some of the country’s richest forests, its most significant mineral reserves, and its most vulnerable tribal populations.

This exercise is not being taken up with a premade assumption that the judiciary is doing a very bad job at protecting environment or interpreting the environment protection law. It is actually made with the contra assumption that the High Courts are being proactive, but it is made with a probing eye to see if there are any deviations, and if so, what do they reveal.

Parts II and III will extend this inquiry to Northern and Western India.

The Baseline

It is unfair to the judiciary and to this exercise to begin with all the environment-protection-dilution jurisprudence and rain only criticism on them. After all, the High Courts have consistently, albeit with exceptions, shown their inclination to protect the environment for the last few decades. It is only fair to begin with where they have held firm.

The Good Days

Madhya Pradesh

Vivek Kumar Sharma v. State of Madhya Pradesh[5] is a good place to start because it shows what the system looks like when it works properly. The MP High Court struck down a 2015 State notification that had exempted sixty-two tree species from the Forest’s Act thus facilitating their transit. The State’s case was that the exemption promoted agroforestry on private lands and had the backing of the Ministry of Environment. The state essentially meant that because those tree species now could be transported without much compliance, private persons will likely grow those trees. The court went and looked at what had actually happened on the ground. No study had been conducted on whether these species also grew in forests. Why would it matter? If these trees did grow in forests, timber mafia would cut down the trees and transport them without any fear of the Forest’s Act’s regulatory quagmire. The State’s own Chief Conservator of Forests, Indore Circle, had reported that the exemption was playing havoc with lush green trees in both forest and non-forest areas. Senior forest officials had flagged that the timber mafia was using the exemption to legitimise illegally procured wood. The court found all this in departmental correspondence that was already on record. Nobody in the State government had acted on it.

The court applied M.K. Ranjitsinh’s precautionary principle,[6] struck down the notification as manifestly arbitrary under Article 14, and refused to entertain the delay objection, holding that environmental questions affecting every citizen’s life cannot be barred by limitation. And it noted, with visible frustration, that but for the PIL petitioners, the court would have been completely aloof of the ground reality. It means the entire regulatory apparatus of the State of Madhya Pradesh had failed to flag what a few public-spirited citizens could demonstrate through departmental correspondence that was already on record. The court stated as follows, observing the faulty manner in which the notifications were issued:

The arbitrary manner in which notifications came to be issued in quick succession from the year 2005 onwards points out clinchingly of the immense pressure of the timber mafia on the State authorities, with the environment and forest as its mute victims. The issuance of impugned notification mechanically, without studying and examining the fundamental aspect of impact of such exemptions on the existing forest cover of the State provokes the conscience of this Court, which has been compounded by dissatisfactory answers given by the State in the present proceedings.

(See ¶ 104.)[7]

On precautionary principle too, the MP High Court had substantial reiterations to be made. It termed the principle one of the “basic features of environmental jurisprudence.” The court stated as follows:

…(the principle) mandates that Courts must lean towards that interpretation of any statutory position, which furthers and advances the precautionary approach towards the environment, forests, and natural resources. Whilst doing so, the Court must be mindful that the State cannot treat the environment, natural resources and forests, as part of its sovereign wealth under its commercial use, rather all these resources are held as a trustee on behalf of the general public.

In a similar vein, the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Indore Bench took suo moto cognisance in late 2025 based on a newspaper report that 5,961 industries in the State were operating without valid permission from the M.P. Pollution Control Board.[8] The court issued notices to the Chief Secretary, the Principal Secretary for Housing and Environment, and the Pollution Control Board. The court’s willingness to act on a newspaper report, to hold the executive accountable for systemic regulatory failure, represents environmental activism of a substantive kind.

Chhattisgarh

The Chhattisgarh High Court has displayed the same instinct: in In Re: Karkhano Ke Avshesh Aag Ke Havale (21 March 2024), the Bilaspur Bench, in a suo moto PIL prompted by a Navbharat report on the burning of industrial waste behind the Sirgitti police station, summoned the State machinery to demonstrate compliance with the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules, 2016, and the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, and ultimately had the District Magistrate convene meetings of regulators and industrial units to translate the Rules into operational practice.[9]

 Jharkhand

Jharkhand provides the fullest contemporary picture of this baseline activism. Three judgments delivered in 2026 by a Division Bench of Chief Justice M.S. Sonak and Justice Rajesh Shankar deserve particular attention.

The first, Jharkhand Human Rights Conference v. State of Jharkhand, decided on February 26 , 2026,[10] closed a Public Interest Litigation that had been pending since 2012 on the management of bio-medical waste. The Court’s narrative of those fourteen years is instructive starting from a 2012 record of “serious deficiencies” in Ranchi, Dhanbad and Jamshedpur; a 2013 finding that the State did not have basic consolidated data on healthcare institutions generating bio-medical waste; photographic evidence of sharps and microbiological material dumped on public roads; state-wide expansion of the proceedings through the State and District Legal Services Authorities; sustained dissatisfaction through 2014 and 2015; supervision of Common Bio-Medical Waste Treatment Facilities at Lohardaga, Ramgarh and Adityapur; and a suo moto intervention at RIMS, Ranchi, in 2024. The Bench recorded that by the time it closed the proceedings, Jharkhand had moved from a single functional treatment facility to six operational CBWTFs, with a seventh under construction.[11] The Court did not, however, make it look like that this was its own work. It explicitly framed the case as one in which “sustained judicial oversight has contributed to a more responsive and coordinated regulatory framework,” cautioned that “constitutional courts cannot assume the role of a continuing administrator where a statutory mechanism is already in place,” and issued a careful set of nineteen coordination-and-enforcement directions that operationalise the 2016 Rules without supplanting them.

The second, Court on Its Own Motion v. State of Jharkhand (February 16 , 2026),[12] arises from a national highway alignment that had been proposed to cut through the Core Zone of a wildlife sanctuary and an Eco-Sensitive Zone. After repeated dissatisfaction with the pace of the NHAI and the State, the Bench directed for a fresh proposal for an alternative alignment passing through plain and rolling terrain and not through the Core Zone or ESZ, and pressed the State to file an animal-passage plan. The order is short and unremarkable in its own terms; what is remarkable is the assumption running through it, that an executive statement about wildlife corridors made in court must mean what it says, and that two years of non-compliance with such a statement is not an acceptable place for the proceedings to rest.

The third, Anand Kumar v. State of Jharkhand (April 16, 2026),[13] was a PIL by a retired Range Forest Officer challenging two notifications of the Jharkhand State Pollution Control Board that had reduced the minimum distance for stone mining and stone crushers from forest and forest-land boundaries from 500 metres to 250 metres. The State produced a 2015 “Expert Committee” NOC, but the Court read it carefully. Of the five members of the committee, only one was an environmental engineer; the rest were bureaucrats from Mines and Industries Departments and a state industrial agency. The NOC, on its face, did nothing more than refer to siting norms in other States — Orissa, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Bihar — and on that basis proposed a 50 percent reduction in the buffer zone for Jharkhand. There was no comparative analysis of forest density, topography, or ecological sensitivity. The Bench held that this was an exercise vitiated by non-application of mind and by exclusion of relevant considerations, that the precautionary principle “tilts the balance of convenience considerably towards imposing restrictions on the grant of consents within 500 metres of forests and forest lands,” and that the harm to the ecology is “often irreversible.” Until final disposal, the position prevailing before the impugned notifications stands restored: 500 metres for stone mining, 400 metres for stone crushers, and the one-kilometre eco-sensitive zone around national parks and wildlife sanctuaries laid down by the Supreme Court in T.N. Godavarman.[14] The Court’s reasoning is significant for two reasons. First, it draws openly on the precautionary principle of Ranjitsinh, treating it as decisive rather than ornamental. Second, it refuses to defer to the “Expert Committee” label without examining whether the committee was, in any meaningful sense, expert.

The fourth Jharkhand decision in this group, Hemant Kumar Shikarwar v. State of Jharkhand (May 7 , 2026),[15] extends the same approach to enforcement. The petition concerned illegal stone mining and non-compliant stone crusher units around the Siwane River in Hazaribagh district. Drawing on an independent report by the District Legal Services Authority, the Bench documented abandoned water-filled mining pits, damage to roughly a hundred hectares of cultivable land, and disruption of the river’s ecological balance. What is notable is the structural relief that follows. The Bench directs monthly District Level Task Force meetings, an exhaustive review of every Environmental Clearance, Consent to Establish, Consent to Operate, Explosive Licence and mineral-dealer registration in the area, suspension of mining operations until compliances are verified, the Hazaribagh Wildlife Sanctuary one-kilometre buffer, technology-driven enforcement through Wi-Fi-enabled CCTV and GPS tracking, criminal prosecution under §§ 21 and 22 of the MMDR Act, and the application of the polluter-pays principle to recover environmental compensation.[16] The polluter-pays principle is invoked, but it is invoked in its proper register — as a tool of reparation imposed on identified violators, not as a substitute for prevention.

It is worth pausing here on a different kind of Jharkhand case. In Jharkhand Int Nirmata Sangh v. State of Jharkhand (January 15, 2026),[17] a Division Bench of Justices Sujit Narayan Prasad and Arun Kumar Rai rejected a writ petition by brick kiln operators who had been required to obtain environmental clearance and Pollution Control Board consents for soil extraction and brick manufacturing. The petitioners’ argument was that the removal of soil for brick-making has no adverse environmental impact and that, in any event, the District Mineral Foundation Trust contribution under the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 was not attracted because brick earth is not a “mineral” in the operative sense. The Court rejected both contentions on the simple ground that “soil is also a part of environment and if the soil is being extracted for the purpose of brick kiln the same certainly have the environmental impact.” Brick earth, the Court noted, is listed as a minor mineral in Schedule 2 of the Jharkhand Minor Mineral Concession Rules, 2004, and the manufacturing process cannot be artificially separated from the extraction. It refused to allow the absence of obvious smoke or effluent to be confused with the absence of environmental impact.

The High Courts of this region are, on the whole, capable of vigorous, principled environmental adjudication. The question that follows, then, is when and why does this rigour falter?

What about the bad days?

If the above discussion is affirmative of the proactive role the High Courts have come to play in the development of environmental jurisprudence, the following discussion exposes some cracks. The cracks are at their clearest when one looks at the High Court of Chhattisgarh’s engagement, over fourteen years, with the Hasdeo coal belt. Three judgments form a sequence: Mangal Sai v. Union of India (May 11, 2022), Amrit Lal Bhagat v. State of Chhattisgarh (September 1, 2025), and the Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti appeal (April 2026). The legal context shifts slightly from one to the next while the result does not.

A chain of deviations

In Mangal Sai,[18] a Division Bench of Chief Justice Arup Kumar Goswami and Justice R.C.S. Samant disposed of five connected writ petitions filed by 156-odd tribal residents of Charpara Tara, Salhi, Hariharpur and Fattehpur villages in Surguja and Surajpur districts. The petitioners challenged the acquisition of about 1252 hectares of land for the Parsa coal block under the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, by Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd. and its mine developer-operator. The grounds were familiar: that the Parsa block was in dense forest, that the PESA Act, 1996 had not been followed, that the gazette notifications under §§ 4(1) and 7(1) of the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957 (CB Act) were not properly served, that some Gram Sabha resolutions were fake. The Court held that gazette notifications had in fact been published; that, the CB Act not requiring personal service of generally addressed notifications, the want of personal service did not vitiate them; that some villagers had filed late objections, which the Coal Controller had considered; and that there was “gross delay” in approaching the Court — the petitions, filed in 2022, challenged notifications of 2017 and 2018. On this basis the petitions were dismissed, with no examination of the underlying ecological objections to mining in dense forest, and no consideration of whether the delay rule should yield where the consequences of the executive action are irreversible.

In Amrit Lal Bhagat,[19] delivered just seven months before the Hasdeo Aranya appeal and from the very same Court, a single Bench dismissed a petition by thirty-eight named residents of Mudagaon and Saraitola villages in Raigarh district. The petitioners had challenged the Stage II forest clearance granted by the Ministry of Environment in respect of 214.869 hectares of forest land for an open-cast coal mining project allotted to a State-owned generation company. Their grievance was that the diversion proceedings had been completed in violation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 — without the participation of the petitioners and without recognition of the community forest rights of their Gram Sabhas. The Court framed the threshold issue narrowly. “In absence of a resolution of the Gram Sabha authorizing the institution of the present proceedings,” the petitioners did not have the requisite locus standi, and in any case had an alternative remedy under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010. The petition was dismissed as not maintainable.[20]

The logic here repays close attention. Community forest rights are, the Forest Rights Act says, vested collectively in the Gram Sabha. From that the Court derives a procedural conclusion: only the Gram Sabha, by formal resolution, can litigate to defend those rights. Individual residents who are members of the Gram Sabha and whose lives are directly affected by the diversion of community forest land may not approach the High Court without such a resolution. To require a Gram Sabha resolution before a writ challenge can even be heard is to interpose the very body whose capacity to deliberate and resolve the question may itself have been compromised by the State action under challenge — particularly where, as the Mangal Sai record indicates, allegations of fake Gram Sabha resolutions in the same coal belt had already been before this Court.

The contrast with how the same High Court has handled coal-related petitions by non-tribal individuals is instructive. In Ratan Kumar Jain v. State of Madhya Pradesh (now Chhattisgarh),[21] a Division Bench of Chief Justice Yatindra Singh and Justice Sunil Kumar Sinha entertained writ petitions filed in person by a Korea-district journalist challenging the illegal felling of trees by South Eastern Coalfields Limited at Chirmiri, with no question raised about his personal locus to challenge the operations of a public-sector coal company in his neighbourhood. The Court used the occasion to deliver one of the more memorable passages on environmental protection in the region: “Environment, trees are not devil; they are entitled to much better protection: after all, we have borrowed them from our children and have a pledge to return them back — if not in a better position then at least in the same position as we had got them.” The petitioner — a single individual, with no Gram Sabha resolution — was nominated to an independent monitoring committee. The doctrinal question is not whether Ratan Jain got the law of locus right and Amrit Lal Bhagat got it wrong, or vice versa. The doctrinal question is whether the same threshold of standing is being applied to the same kind of grievance. The honest answer, reading these cases together, is that it is not.

Hasdeo Aranya

The Hasdeo case carries forward the same logic. It is no different than any case with forest conservation on one side and the mining industry on the other. A healthy sprinkle of forest rights is what complicated, rightly so, the issue. The Hasdeo Aranya forest is called the lungs of Chhattisgarh. It is old-growth forest, ecologically and culturally significant, home to tribal communities who depend on it for subsistence. Coal sits beneath it.

What was the case?

After bureaucratic processes which included a sub-committee on Forest Advisory cautioning about the risks of large-scale mining, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) granted in-principle approvals for mining in the Hasdeo forest.[22] Later, the Chhattisgarh government passed orders diverting forest land for non-forest use in 2012. Both the MoEF and State government orders were set aside by the NGT.[23] However, the Supreme Court granted an interim stay. On the strength of such interim stay, and a new legislation on coal mining and block allocation, the permission for Phase I mining of the coal was given to Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam, the Rajasthan state-owned electricity company.[24]

Parallelly, proceedings for individual and community forest rights were being conducted wherein three community rights were granted to Ghatbarra village in 2013.[25] On January 8, 2016, the District Level Committee issued a notice stating that the Community Forest Rights earlier granted to Village Ghatbarra were cancelled.[26] It was the case of petitioners that they were not given a fair hearing before the Community Forest Rights (CFR) were cancelled.

The writ petition was filed, first challenging this 2016 notice by the DLC, and later amended their prayer to challenge the later orders by the MoEF for Phase II mining too.

The State’s reason for cancellation, recorded in the DLC’s notice of 08.01.2016, was chronological: the diversion order had been passed on March 28, 2012, whereas the three community forest rights in favour of Ghatbarra were recognised on September 3, 2013. The diversion preceded the recognition; therefore, on the State’s logic, the recognition was either erroneous or could not survive the prior diversion.

Two things ought to have given the court pause here, and neither was addressed. First, the chronology argument inverts the scheme of the Forest Rights Act, 2006. Section 4 (5) of the Act bars eviction or removal of forest dwellers from forest land under their occupation till the recognition and verification process is complete.[27] The Act treats forest rights as pre-existing rights that the statute recognises, not as rights that the statute creates from the date of the recognition order.[28] On that reading, a 2013 recognition order documents rights that were always there, including in March 2012 when the diversion was approved. The State’s chronology, in other words, proves too little — it assumes the rights began in 2013, which is precisely what the Act denies.

Second, even if one were to accept the State’s premise, the cancellation of recognised rights triggers, at a minimum, the obligation to hear the rights-holders before extinguishing what the statute has acknowledged. The DLC’s notice of January 8, 2016 did not afford that hearing. The single judge’s view — that no opportunity needed to be given — sidesteps both the substantive point about when the rights came into existence and the procedural point about how recognised rights may be withdrawn.

One of the arguments by the State before the Hasdeo Aranya case was that since coal has already been mined out the subject lands, they cannot be considered as forests. If they cannot be considered as forests, no forest rights can be claimed. The Chhattisgarh government argued that the Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh does not have legal sanctity to represent the villagers.

Single Judge’s reasoning for Dismissal

The single judge dismissed the petition[29] on the following grounds:

(i) Diversion order (2012) is prior to CFR granting order (2013) and yet, the diversion was not challenged then or in this Writ Petition.

(ii) None of the petitioners showed that they have forest rights conferred on them or that they are aggrieved persons or that any Gram Sabha resolution has been passed to continue on with the petition.

(iii) The residents can be compensated in terms of money, if the forest rights have not been conferred according to the FRA, 2006.

The judge, after listing the grounds, stated as follows:

It wasn’t necessary for the respondents to provide the petitioners with an opportunity while taking a decision to withdraw the forest rights conferred on the villagers of Ghatbarra.

What is the issue with the Single Judge’s reasoning?

The issue with the single judge’s reasoning is not that he failed to be an activist judge. A writ petition is not a PIL, and the judge was right to treat it as such. The issue is narrower and harder to defend: even within the four corners of an ordinary writ petition under Article 226, the cancellation order of 2016 was open to challenge on its own terms. The petitioners had asked for it to be set aside on the ground that no hearing was given before community forest rights, once recognised, were withdrawn. That is a self-contained natural justice claim. It does not require the court to expand standing, revisit the 2012 diversion, or assume a PIL posture. It requires the court to ask one question: can a statutory right recognised under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 be cancelled without affording the rights-holders an opportunity of hearing? The single judge’s answer that “it wasn’t necessary for the respondents to provide the petitioners with an opportunity” is what merits scrutiny.

The court held that the petitioners had not established they were directly aggrieved persons with subsisting legal rights. These are tribal villagers. They are challenging the destruction of their ancestral forest. They claim community forest rights under a statute that was enacted specifically to recognise and protect those rights. The PIL jurisdiction exists because Justices Bhagwati and Krishna Iyer understood that marginalised people cannot always demonstrate ‘standing’ in the way that a property-owning litigant can.[30] While this was not a PIL, to turn a procedural requirement against the very people the Forest Rights Act was written for is to use a doctrine against its own purpose. One cannot read this stiffness charitably.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court, in the same year, in Vivek Kumar Sharma, held that environmental challenges cannot be defeated by limitation. To be hot and cold on locus of petitioners in sensitive environmental matters is not rooted in some deep philosophical underpinning. It is simply a choice that the court in one case makes to allow and makes in another to disallow on the basis of locus.

And then the Single Judge observed that monetary compensation could suffice for the loss of the forest. The appellants said what needed to be said, i.e., no amount of money restores an old-growth forest. The cultural rights, the subsistence, the biodiversity, the watershed function — none of it comes back with a cheque.

This is the polluter-pays principle being used to replace the precautionary principle, something that Justice Bhuyan’s Vanashakti dissent warned against.

The Appeal in Hasdeo Aranya

The Division Bench dismissed the writ appeal in April 2026.[31] The respondent mining company continued to press locus standi, res judicata, and finality. The Division Bench agreed, holding that the petition was a collateral assault on concluded proceedings and that monetary compensation arguments, “though conceptually appealing,” could not override the legal framework once statutory clearances had been granted and acted upon. The Division Bench stated as follows:

Courts, while sensitive to environmental concerns, are also required to balance competing public interests, particularly where projects have attained substantial completion and involve larger public utility considerations.

Now, this is not some isolated observation by a Division Bench of the Chhattisgarh High Court. Its doctrinal substance comes from the Supreme Court itself — from the judgment in Vanashakti II, in which the apex court stated as follows:[32]

It can thus be seen that this Court clearly held that where the adverse consequences of ex-post facto approval outweigh the consequences of regularisation of operation of an industry by grant of ex-post facto approval and the industry or establishment concerned otherwise conforms to the requisite pollution norms, ex-post facto approval should be given in accordance with law, in strict conformity with the applicable rules, regulations and/or notifications.

The doctrinal tools used here — locus, delay, finality, monetary compensation — are the same tools available to any court. In Vivek Kumar Sharma, every one of them was considered and rejected. In Hasdeo Aranya, every one of them was accepted. In Anand Kumar and Hemant Shikarwar, the Jharkhand Bench reached for the same tools and used them, in the precautionary direction, against the State. The difference is not the law. The difference is coal.

Shanti Construction and the Procedural Double Standard

The Orissa High Court’s decision in Shanti Construction v. State of Odisha[33] raises a different kind of problem.

A construction company got temporary permission to excavate 2,000 cubic metres of earth for a railway project. It excavated about 2, 60, 580 cubic metres — 130 times the permitted quantity — from government land, including jungle category land. The NGT directed recovery of Rs. 1,20,10,000 as environmental compensation.

The High Court quashed the order. The Joint Committee’s inspection had been done without notice to the petitioner. The committee included regulatory bodies that were themselves accused of inaction. The quantification was sub-delegated to the Mining Officer without proper safeguards.

It is not wrong to be a stickler for rules and procedures, especially by authorities with penal powers. It is an important feature that the judiciary should imbibe itself with, surely. The NGT’s practice of farming out adjudicatory work to joint committees has real due process problems. No argument there.

But the company dug out 130 times what it was allowed to dig. That violation did not go anywhere. The court quashed the enforcement order and told the parties to pursue their rights before the appropriate authority. The enforcement was procedurally defective but the violation itself remains unaddressed.

The Odisha High Court in its order stated as follows:[34]

The NGT’s order of May 2, 2025 is vitiated by breach of natural justice by unlawful delegation of its judicial function to the joint committee without affording the petitioner a hearing. The alternative remedy of appeal does not preclude relief, since the order is tainted by fundamental unfairness.

A note of caution before drawing the comparison too tightly. The two cases are not perfectly parallel. Hasdeo Aranya was a constitutional challenge to executive decisions on forest diversion and rights cancellation; Shanti Construction was judicial review of a quasi-judicial NGT order said to be tainted by a natural justice defect. The doctrinal lenses differ, and a court reviewing tribunal action does have a sharper supervisory role on procedural fairness than a court reviewing a policy-laden executive choice. That much should be conceded.

What survives the concession, however, is the asymmetry in how the same threshold doctrines — i.e., alternative remedy, hearing, finality — are weighted against environmental stakes. In Shanti Construction, the existence of an alternative statutory appeal did not deter the High Court from intervening, because the want of a hearing was treated as a fundamental defect overriding the alternative-remedy bar. In Hasdeo Aranya, and again in Amrit Lal Bhagat, the want of a hearing before cancellation of recognised forest rights — or the absence of formal Gram Sabha authorisation — did not produce a comparable response; finality, locus and alternative-remedy considerations carried the day.

A similar asymmetry appears in M/s Jindal India Thermal Power Ltd. v. State of Odisha (September 25, 2024),[35] where the Odisha State Pollution Control Board had revoked a 2×600 MW coal-based thermal power plant’s Consent to Operate for direct discharge of wastewater into the Kakudia Nallah, which feeds the Tikira river. The plant was ordered shut. By the time the writ came up for hearing, the company had produced affidavits of compliance during pendency. The High Court quashed the revocation order, observing that the Writ Petition need not be kept pending unnecessarily, and remarking only — almost in passing — that “damage to the environment cannot get a tacit community tolerance.” The same Court that demands strict due process from the NGT when the polluter is the petitioner, accepts compliance-during-pendency as adequate when it is the polluter’s licence at stake. The two postures are not inconsistent in any narrow doctrinal sense. They are different defaults.

Quiet Changes in Language

In M/s Balasore Alloys Ltd. v. Union of India (3 November 2023)[36], the petitioner, a chromite mining lessee in Kaliapani, Jajpur district, had been kept out of a 64.463-hectare forest portion of its leasehold because the Stage II forest clearance had not issued. The Court walked through the chronology — initial mining lease in 2000, splitting of the lease into forest and non-forest blocks, withdrawal of an earlier writ, a string of applications for compensatory afforestation land and Net Present Value payments, and intermittent inaction by the State. The High Court issued a writ of mandamus directing the opposite parties to “grant necessary Stage II forest clearance in respect of the subject mineral block over an area 64.463 hectares… by complying all the formalities as expeditiously as possible without creating further hindrances in the matter.” One looks at this judgment in vain for any examination of the present condition of the forest in question, the cumulative impact of chromite mining in the Sukinda valley, or the population that lives downstream of these leaseholds. The Court’s mandamus is, on its face, a mandamus to discharge a statutory duty without delay. It is also, in substance, a judicial accelerant to the grant of a forest clearance, framed entirely in the lessee’s rights.

The Odisha Citizens’ Action Forum PIL[37] shows a related pattern, and it is in some ways more telling than Hasdeo Aranya, because here the Court was not even pushed by a contest between an industry and a forest community. There was no displacement at stake. There was no felling of trees in real time. The petition, brought by a Bhubaneswar-based forum, was about something much more anodyne in its framing: that mining lessees in Odisha were not extracting iron ore at the volumes their leases obligated them to, and that the State was not enforcing Rule 12 (1) (ee) of the Concession Rules, 2016, which permits the State to step in and carry out the mining itself at the lessee’s cost when the lessee defaults on its statutory obligations. That is the sum of the grievance. The lessees are not mining enough.

Now, one would think that this is exactly the kind of complaint a State government, with a full apparatus of mining officials, geological surveys, and a Department of Steel and Mines, would be able to address on its own. The State knows how much each lessee has been allotted. The State has the production figures. The State has the rule that lets it act. If lessees are sitting on iron ore reserves and not extracting them, the State can issue notices, levy penalties, invoke Rule 12 (1) (ee) and have the National Mineral Development Corporation step in. None of this requires a writ court. It is plain administrative function. And yet the High Court, instead of asking the obvious threshold question of why a constitutional court is being moved to do what an executive department is paid to do, took up the petition, called for affidavits, and eventually directed the State to invoke Rule 12 (1) (ee) and route the underutilised mines to NMDC.

The Court’s framing is what makes the case worth dwelling on. Iron ore reserves are described as having “potential capacity to meet the requisite requirements in the indigenous market.” The 2015 amendments to the MMDR Act[38] are described as a “radical shift” from executive fiat to a transparent auction regime. The Make in India initiative is invoked. Bhushan Power and Steel Ltd. v. State of Odisha[39] is cited at length for the proposition that the auction regime aims at eliminating discretion, attracting private investment and securing for the Government an enhanced share of the value of mineral resources. Article 39(b)[40] is mentioned, but only to ground a duty of “optimum, continuous and sustainable utilization” of minerals. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of resource governance.

This is not a case where the Court refused to consider environmental concerns because they were not raised. They were not raised, and that is precisely the point. The petition was framed to push for more extraction, and the Court accepted the frame without interrogating it. A High Court hearing a PIL is not a passive forum. It can, and routinely does in other contexts, expand the scope of the petition, call for the State to file additional reports, ask uncomfortable questions about cumulative impact. The Madhya Pradesh High Court did exactly this in Vivek Kumar Sharma when it went looking through departmental correspondence on its own. The Jharkhand High Court did the same in Anand Kumar when it unpacked the composition and reasoning of the so-called Expert Committee whose recommendation underlay the impugned buffer-zone notification. Here, the Orissa High Court did the opposite. It accepted, at face value, that the constitutional concern in the matter was underutilisation, and on that basis it issued a direction that the State further activate iron ore mining across blocks where production was low. There is no sign in the judgment that the Court asked whether some of these blocks were not being mined for reasons that might actually deserve protection: a pending forest clearance issue, an unresolved claim under the Forest Rights Act, environmental compliance defaults that might justify slowing down rather than speeding up extraction. The premise was that the mines must be mined.

When a court starts with the question ‘has this lessee complied with its conditions’ instead of ‘should extraction happen here given what we know about this ecosystem,’ the answer is mostly predetermined.

What Comes Through

A few things come through when you look at all of this together.

Locus standi and delay are being applied selectively. Same doctrine, opposite results, depending on what is being challenged. The law has not changed between Vivek Kumar Sharma and Hasdeo Aranya, between Ratan Jain and Amrit Lal Bhagat, between Anand Kumar and Mangal Sai. The economic interest has.

The fait accompli has become its own justification. Phase-I is done, so Phase-II must follow. The project is built, so the clearance must be regularised. The compliance came during pendency, so the revocation must be quashed. This rewards the very non-compliance it is supposed to prevent. The Vanashakti review relied partly on this logic too: the cost of undoing what had been built without clearance became the reason not to undo it.

Money is being treated as a substitute for ecology, without anyone checking whether the money actually does anything. Where the polluter-pays principle survives in its proper form — as in Hemant Shikarwar — it is imposed on identified violators after a finding of breach. Where it is abused — as in the Hasdeo Aranya disposal — it replaces the precautionary principle and lets the breach itself stand.

And there is a diagnostic that is quite reliable: look at whether the judgment engages with ecological evidence. Vivek Kumar Sharma is full of it. Forest survey reports, departmental findings, species data. Anand Kumar interrogates the composition of the Expert Committee and the substance of the NOC. Hemant Shikarwar relies on an independent DLSA report of abandoned pits and degraded farmland. Jharkhand Human Rights Conference works from photographic evidence of dumped sharps. The Hasdeo Aranya dismissal does not engage with the ecological significance of the forest at all. Balasore Alloys does not weigh the chromite footprint in the Sukinda valley. The Orissa iron-ore PIL does not so much as look up at the forest cover. Courts have only come up with pro-environment jurisprudence when they looked at hard evidence.

Looking Ahead

This present exercise is neither a whistle nor some big breaking, to project some kind of institutional takeover. It is simply a neutral probe, with utmost respect for and faith in the rich jurisprudence that countless movements have collectively achieved via a progressive judiciary.

The Indian Environmental Law Regime is not a simple one. It is filled with exceptions, absolutisms, resulting paradoxes, rectifying reviews, and much more. The Vanashakti split is proof of that complexity. The precautionary principle is the cornerstone, and a court cannot be seen backtracking on it. That position finds its fullest expression in Vivek Kumar Sharma, in the Jharkhand Bench’s 2026 quartet, and in the Chhattisgarh High Court’s suo moto responsiveness on industrial waste. It finds its starkest negation in Hasdeo Aranya, in the locus-standi disposal of Amrit Lal Bhagat, and in the quieter accommodation of mining capital in the Orissa lease cases.

The cracks appear when the economic interests are large and state-backed; when the affected communities are Adivasi/tribal, rural, and litigation-poor; when the extraction has progressed far enough to create a fait accompli; and when the environmental harm is diffuse and long-term and falls on people without political voice. Where these conditions converge, courts, sometimes, seem to reach for the procedural exit, sidestepping the petitioner environmental question.

Whether these cracks hold in Northern and Western India is what the next two parts will try to find out.

Note:

The 3-part series is based on strong empirical standing. Part I deals with substantive high court pronouncements coming from resource rich Central and Eastern India- Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. Part II (Western India) deals with the high courts of Bombay, Karnataka and Goa. Finally, Part III (Northern India) reflects on judgments from Delhi, Punjab & Haryana, Uttarakhand and Allahabad.

 (The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

[1]Vanashakti v. Union of India, decided 16 May 2025 (Supreme Court of India, Bench: Oka & Bhuyan, JJ.). Striking down MoEFCC Notification S.O. 804(E) dated March 14, 2017 and Office Memorandum dated July 7, 2021.

[2]The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, §§ 3, 6 read with the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 (S.O. 1533(E), dated September 14, 2006).

[3]Vanashakti Review – Order on Review Petition (Nov. 2025), three-Judge Bench, majority opinion by the Chief Justice of India with Vinod Chandran, J., concurring; Bhuyan, J., dissenting.

[4]Common Cause v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 499; Alembic Pharmaceuticals Ltd. v. Rohit Prajapati, (2020) 17 SCC 157; Electrosteel Steels Ltd. v. Union of India, (2021) SCC OnLine SC 1247.

[5]Vivek Kumar Sharma v. State of Madhya Pradesh, W.P. No. 16931/2021, decided by the High Court of Madhya Pradesh, Indore Bench (Division Bench), March 1, 2025.

[6]M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, (2024) SCC OnLine SC 570 (recognising Articles 14 & 21 protection against the adverse effects of climate change and reaffirming the precautionary principle).

[7]Vivek Kumar Sharma, supra n. 5, ¶ 104.

[8]In Re: Functioning of 5,961 Industries without Valid Consent – Suo Moto W.P. (PIL), High Court of Madhya Pradesh, Indore Bench (2025).

[9]See, inter alia, In Re: Suo Moto PIL based on news item “Karkhano Ke Avshesh Aag Ke Havale,” WPPIL 106 of 2023, High Court of Chhattisgarh, order dated 21 March 2024 (hazardous waste burning at Sirgitti industrial estate, Bilaspur); Jharkhand Human Rights Conference v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 1385 of 2012, decided February 26, 2026 (biomedical waste management).

[10]Jharkhand Human Rights Conference v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 1385 of 2012, judgment dated February 26, 2026, Neutral Citation No. 2026:JHHC:5689-DB (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.).

[11]Jharkhand Human Rights Conference, supra n. 10, ¶¶ 18–24 (continuing mandamus from 2012 to 2026; expansion of treatment infrastructure from one CBWTF to six operational facilities across Ramgarh, Lohardaga, Dhanbad, Pakur and Deoghar).

[12]Court on Its Own Motion v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 3935 of 2020, Order dated February 16, 2026 (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.) (proposed national highway realignment to avoid Core Zone of wildlife and Eco-Sensitive Zone; animal-passage plan directed).

[13]Anand Kumar v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 3950 of 2024, order dated April 16 , 2026 (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.).

[14]In Re: T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India, (2022) 10 SCC 544, ¶ 56.1 (one-kilometre eco-sensitive zone around protected areas), as modified by order dated April 26, 2023.

[15]Hemant Kumar Shikarwar v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (PIL) No. 290 of 2013, judgment dated May 7, 2026, Neutral Citation No. 2026:JHHC:13668-DB (Sonak, C.J. and Rajesh Shankar, J.).

[16]Hemant Kumar Shikarwar, supra n. 15, ¶ 79 (directions including monthly District Level Task Force meetings; review of all statutory permissions; CCTV and GPS-based monitoring; criminal prosecution under MMDR Act §§ 21–22; environmental compensation on the polluter-pays principle).

[17]Jharkhand Int Nirmata Sangh v. State of Jharkhand, W.P. (C) No. 617 of 2021, judgment dated January 15, 2026, Neutral Citation No. 2026:JHHC:1169-DB (Sujit Narayan Prasad and Arun Kumar Rai, JJ.) (brick kiln operators’ challenge to environmental clearance and CTO requirement dismissed; District Mineral Foundation Trust payments held attracted).

[18]Mangal Sai v. Union of India, W.P. (C) No. 302 of 2022 and connected matters, decided May 11, 2022 by the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Arup Kumar Goswami, C.J. and Rajendra Chandra Singh Samant, J.) (challenge by 156+ petitioners from Salhi, Hariharpur, Fattehpur and Tara villages to acquisition of land for Parsa Coal Block under the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, dismissed on grounds of delay and merits).

[19]Amrit Lal Bhagat v. State of Chhattisgarh, W.P. (C) No. 2361 of 2025, decided 1 September 2025 by the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Arvind Kumar Verma, J.), Neutral Citation No. 2025:CGHC:44375.

[20]Amrit Lal Bhagat, supra n. 23, ¶¶ 16–17 (dismissing the petition as not maintainable for want of express Gram Sabha authorisation and pointing the petitioners to the alternative remedy under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010).

[21]Ratan Kumar Jain v. State of Madhya Pradesh (now Chhattisgarh), W.P. No. 4520 of 2000 and W.P. (C) No. 5354 of 2009, decided 5 December 2012 by the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Yatindra Singh, C.J. and Sunil Kumar Sinha, J.).

[22]Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980; Stage-I and Stage-II forest clearances accorded by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change for the Parsa East & Kanta Basan (PEKB) and Parsa coal blocks in the Hasdeo Arand region.

[23]Sudiep Shrivastava v. Union of India & Ors., Order of the National Green Tribunal, Principal Bench, dated March 24 , 2014; subsequently stayed by the Supreme Court.

[24]Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act, 2015, read with the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Rules, 2014 and allocation orders to Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd. (RVUNL).

[25]Recognition under §§ 3(1)(i) and 5 of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 in respect of Village Ghatbarra (resolution of the Gram Sabha and order of the Sub-Divisional Level Committee, dated 3 September 2013).

[26]Notice / Order of the District Level Committee, Surguja, dated January 8, 2016 purporting to cancel the Community Forest Rights of Village Ghatbarra.

[27]The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, § 4(5).

[28]See generally Orissa Mining Corp. Ltd. v. Ministry of Environment & Forest, (2013) 6 SCC 476 (Niyamgiri); and Banwasi Seva Ashram v. State of U.P., (1986) 4 SCC 753, on the pre-existing nature of forest dwellers’ rights.

[29]Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti v. State of Chhattisgarh, W.P. (C) before the High Court of Chhattisgarh at Bilaspur (Single Judge), order of dismissal.

[30]Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, (1984) 3 SCC 161; S.P. Gupta v. Union of India, 1981 Supp SCC 87, on relaxed standing in public interest matters.

[31]Hasdeo Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti v. State of Chhattisgarh, Writ Appeal, decided by the Division Bench of the High Court of Chhattisgarh in April 2026.

[32]Vanashakti Review (Nov. 2025), supra n. 3, majority opinion (extract on conditions for ex post facto regularisation).

[33]M/s Shanti Construction v. State of Odisha, W.P. (C) before the High Court of Orissa at Cuttack (decided January 2026), arising from the order of the National Green Tribunal, Eastern Zonal Bench, dated May 2, 2025.

[34]Shanti Construction, supra n. 36, extracted from the High Court’s order quashing the NGT’s direction.

[35]M/s Jindal India Thermal Power Ltd. v. State of Odisha, W.P. (C) No. 8822 of 2024, order dated September 25, 2024 (Dr. S.K. Panigrahi, J.) (consent to operate, revoked by the Odisha State Pollution Control Board for direct discharge of wastewater into the Kakudia Nallah feeding the Tikira river, restored).

[36]M/s Balasore Alloys Ltd. v. Union of India, W.P. (C) decided November 3 , 2023 by the High Court of Orissa (Dr. B.R. Sarangi, A.C.J. and M.S. Raman, J.) (mandamus issued directing grant of Stage II forest clearance for chromite mining over 64.463 hectares in Kaliapani, Jajpur District).

[37]Odisha Citizens’ Action Forum v. State of Odisha, W.P. (PIL) before the High Court of Orissa at Cuttack, concerning enforcement of Rule 12(1)(ee) of the Mineral (Other than Atomic and Hydro Carbons Energy Minerals) Concession Rules, 2016.

[38]Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2015 (Act 10 of 2015).

[39]Bhushan Power & Steel Ltd. v. State of Odisha, (2017) 2 SCC 125.

[40]Constitution of India, art. 39(b) (Directive Principles – distribution of material resources of the community to subserve the common good).

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Cries for Environmental Justice: India at a low 176/180 countries in the 2024 Environmental Performance Index

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Strengthening indigenous communities means protection of the environment 

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