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)

Related:

Cries for Justice in India grow louder!

“Let there be CHRISTMAS…”!

The post Whose ‘ENVIRONMENT’ is it, anyway? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

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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The post Cracks in Indian Environment Jurisprudence: An examination of High Courts of central India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

This piece reads the Charter seriously, which means reading it both appreciatively and critically. It has genuine strengths that deserve recognition. It also carries certain limitations that are worth naming honestly, not to undermine the effort but because the quality of the document warrants that kind of engagement.

A Decade of Stalled Policy

To understand what this Charter is trying to do, it helps to recall the political history that preceded it. In 2011, a panel led by ecologist Madhav Gadgil submitted a science-based framework for governing the Western Ghats. It proposed meaningful conservation, community-controlled decision-making through gram sabhas, and restrictions on mining, quarrying and destructive infrastructure in ecologically sensitive areas. The scientific case was widely regarded as sound.

Madhav Gadgil

The political reception was not. A coalition of church institutions, plantation interests, quarry operators and farming organisations in the Ghats districts framed the report as an anti-people agenda that threatened the livelihoods of smallholders and plantation workers. No Kerala government, regardless of political alignment, was willing to defend it. The Kasturirangan Committee, constituted in response, offered a more moderate approach: satellite-based mapping to distinguish natural from cultural landscapes, with strict protection applied only to the former. Even this considerably diluted version faced persistent resistance in the Ghats districts. Fifteen years later, Ecologically Sensitive Zone notification in Kerala remains incomplete and contested.

The environmental movement drew a clear lesson from this experience. Conservation arguments that do not attend to livelihood and development concerns are politically self-defeating in a democratic context. Meanwhile, the state had accumulated a different kind of evidence about what ecological neglect actually costs. The 2018 floods caused widespread devastation and prompted the Rebuild Kerala initiative, which for the first time embedded resilience thinking into state-level planning. The Mundakkai-Chooralmala landslide of 30 July 2024, which resulted in 373 deaths, over 200 injuries and 218 people still missing, remains the most devastating disaster in Kerala’s recorded history. These events gave ecological arguments a human weight that policy documents alone could not provide. The Charter reflects what the movement has arrived at after absorbing both lessons.

The Mundakkai-Chooralmala landslide

What the Charter Proposes

From Forest to Sea is an unusually substantive document for a civil society manifesto. It is organised around the idea that Kerala’s ecological systems form a single connected landscape running from the forests of the Western Ghats through midland hills, agricultural land, wetlands and rivers to the coast. Disturbances in any part of this system affect the whole. Upstream deforestation intensifies downstream floods. Floodplain encroachment amplifies coastal erosion. Wetland loss reduces a city’s capacity to absorb flood water. The Charter argues that governing this landscape requires not sectoral programmes operating in isolation but integrated governance across the entire continuum.

This framework is translated into proposals across eleven sectors including agriculture, forests, water, coastal ecosystems, infrastructure, mining, urban ecology, waste management, tourism and energy. For each sector the Charter offers both a situational assessment and specific commitments formatted for direct adoption by political parties. These range from structural proposals such as river basin governance and agroecological transition to specific ones such as Ecological Service Payments of at least Rs 2,500 per acre per year for wetland-conserving paddy farmers, mandatory 200-metre buffer zones for quarry blasting near residential settlements, and abandonment of the proposed coastal highway.

The governance architecture proposed is equally detailed. A Kerala Climate Action and Resilience Mission with cross-sectoral authority is the centrepiece, supported by approximately fifteen new missions and councils covering wetlands, river basins, coastal resilience and urban ecology. This is complemented by proposals for ecology-tagged budgeting, ecological fiscal transfers to local governments, and a Kerala Climate Rehabilitation Act modelled on the land acquisition law that would give climate-displaced communities enforceable rights. Taken together, the Charter represents the most detailed attempt yet made in Kerala to translate ecological governance principles into a politically addressable policy programme.

The Charter also makes a significant political choice in how it frames ecology in relation to development. Rather than presenting conservation as a constraint on growth, it argues that functional ecological systems are a precondition for it. Paddy fields buffer floods. Wetlands recharge groundwater. Mangroves protect coastlines. Forests sustain rivers. Degrading these systems generates public costs through disaster relief, infrastructure repair and agricultural losses that standard development accounting does not capture. This reframing is one of the Charter’s most important contributions.

Paddy Fields in Kerela

The Charter also ties its ecological proposals to livelihood protections in ways its predecessors did not. Ecological Service Payments for paddy farmers, wildlife damage compensation within thirty days rather than the current years-long wait, Adivasi rights to be recognised before any relocation is considered, and Free Prior and Informed Consent for fishing communities before coastal development proceeds are among the provisions that reflect this orientation. These are not decorative additions. They represent a serious attempt to sever the equation that made the Gadgil report politically indefensible: that environmental protection means taking something away from people who have little to spare.

Human-wildlife conflict receives more specific attention in the Charter than in most previous policy documents. It calls for wildlife damage compensation to be settled within thirty days, a universal insurance system for crop and livestock losses, and a statutory interstate coordination mechanism between Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu for managing shared elephant corridors. On relocation, the Charter is explicit that communities in or near elephant corridors cannot be displaced until their rights are fully recognised and fair compensation provided, acknowledging in its own language the historical injustice involved. These are more grounded provisions than earlier frameworks offered.

What the Charter Leaves Unanswered

Acknowledging what the Charter achieves does not require setting aside its limitations. The political constraints that shaped its strategic choices also produce certain silences, and some of these are worth examining carefully.

The first concerns the Western Ghats. The Charter calls for development proposals in the region to be evaluated against ecological carrying capacity, which is the right principle. But it does not specify what follows when that evaluation produces a negative answer. This is precisely the question that made the Gadgil report so difficult to defend politically. Recognising the WGEEP as legitimate science is not the same as demonstrating how its findings can be applied in practice when organised and powerful interests are opposed. The Charter proposes a Western Ghats Ecological Governance Council to manage these decisions, but it does not explain how such a body would be constituted or insulated from the same coalition of interests that stalled implementation for fifteen years. This is a significant gap, and one that future policy work will need to address directly.

The second limitation concerns what governance scholars sometimes call wicked problems. These are situations where ecological requirements and existing livelihood practices point in opposite directions and where no straightforward policy solution exists. The Charter’s call for seasonal fishing bans in wetland breeding grounds is ecologically sound, but communities dependent on inland fishing have no immediate alternative income during those periods, and the livelihood support provisions in this section remain vague. Similarly, the Charter is appropriately direct about ecological damage from unmanaged tourism in Munnar and Wayanad, but the tourism economy in those districts has become a significant source of income for large numbers of homestay operators, guides, vehicle owners and vendors. Carrying capacity limits would have real distributional consequences that the Charter acknowledges without fully working through. Where ecological and livelihood interests are compatible, the Charter is careful and detailed. Where they conflict, it tends to state the ecological position and note the livelihood concern without resolving the tension.

The third limitation is structural. The Charter documents ecological degradation with considerable authority, but it is relatively silent on the forces systematically producing it: real estate speculation, the remittance-driven construction boom, tourism promoted as a state growth strategy, and the infrastructure-led development model. These are not incidental factors. Governance prescriptions that do not engage them risk remaining parallel to the development model rather than transforming it.

Finally, the Charter’s institutional proposals are ambitious but unsequenced. Approximately fifteen new missions, councils and coordination bodies are proposed without a prioritisation logic, without an assessment of the cumulative administrative and financial demands they would place on the state, and without guidance on how jurisdictional conflicts between them would be managed. Kerala’s governance experience suggests that institutional multiplication without adequate capacity and sequencing tends to produce overlap rather than improved outcomes. The Charter would be more useful as a political document if it indicated which institutions should be established first and why.

The Charter as a Political Document

The limitations noted above do not diminish what the Charter represents as a political intervention. It is designed as a pre-election document, and its proposals are formatted as manifesto commitments precisely so that parties can adopt them and be held accountable for them. This is a legitimate and important function, and it is worth being clear about what it asks of the political process.

The question that voters and civil society organisations should be putting to the major parties is not a general one about environmental commitment. General commitments are easy to make and difficult to measure. The questions the Charter makes possible are specific. Will the party commit to abandoning the proposed coastal highway? Will ecology-tagged budgeting be introduced in the first budget? Will time-bound wildlife damage compensation be implemented? Will a climate displacement rehabilitation law be enacted? Which of the Charter’s institutional proposals will be established in the first year of government, and in what sequence?

These are questions that have concrete answers, and parties that have offered detailed positions on industrial investment, infrastructure spending and fiscal policy should be equally capable of responding to them. The Charter has done the work of translating ecological governance into politically addressable commitments. Whether that work produces accountability before and after the election depends on whether civil society organisations, journalists and voters treat these commitments as seriously as they treat other manifesto promises.

There is a broader point here as well. Kerala’s political parties have governed the state through two major flood disasters and one catastrophic landslide in less than a decade. The question of how the landscape is governed is no longer a specialist concern. It is a matter of public safety, fiscal prudence and the long-term viability of the state’s agricultural and coastal economies. The Charter makes that case carefully and in detail. The election is an opportunity to determine whether Kerala’s major parties have heard it.

After the Manifesto

The Charter’s deeper limitation is not a failure of analysis. It is a feature of the form. Manifestos identify what should happen. They are not designed to work through what happens when the communities whose livelihoods are directly affected resist, negotiate or require something different from what the policy proposes. The next phase of this work requires going beyond demonstrating that ecology and development are broadly compatible, which the Charter does effectively, to navigating honestly the cases where they are not.

Those cases involve communities with real and legitimate economic stakes in the outcome. The small farmers in forest-edge settlements whose income from marginal land is affected if quarrying is restricted. The fishing families whose wet season catches sustain them through leaner months when breeding bans apply. The homestay owners in the hill districts who have built their livelihoods around a visitor economy that carrying capacity limits would change. These are not obstacles to ecological governance. They are the communities that ecological governance most needs to engage seriously.

Human-wildlife conflict illustrates the limits of what compensation-based approaches can achieve. The Charter’s provisions on time-bound compensation and universal insurance address real and long-neglected grievances. But compensation responds to damage after it has occurred. The underlying conflict, between wildlife movement and settled farming communities in forest-edge areas, is persistent, geographically specific and carries costs that fall disproportionately on already economically marginal households. Working through it requires sustained institutional engagement with affected communities, not just a policy commitment. The Charter names this problem more honestly than its predecessors. Resolving it will take considerably more.

Doing justice to all these cases requires not just livelihood provisions appended to conservation proposals, but sustained institutional processes for working through conflicts, with affected communities participating meaningfully, with enforceable protections in place, and with enough flexibility to adjust when plans meet ground conditions that policy did not anticipate.

The Charter points toward this work without completing it. That is perhaps as much as a document of this kind can reasonably do.

What it has done is considerable. It has produced a rigorous, rights-integrated ecological framework and placed it before Kerala’s major parties on the eve of an election, addressed not to specialists but to the political process itself. In the fifteen years since the Gadgil report, Kerala’s environmental movement has learned that scientific rigour alone does not determine policy outcomes. Equally important is the capacity to translate ecological knowledge into political commitments that parties can carry and communities can demand. The Charter represents a serious attempt at that translation. Whether the translation holds through an election campaign, a government formation and the ordinary pressures of administration is the question that the next phase of this work will have to answer.

The author is grateful to Sridhar Radhakrishnan, Chair of the Drafting Committee, for conversations that informed this piece. The usual disclaimers apply.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post Ecology Before the Ballot Box appeared first on SabrangIndia.

For a country that saw the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and many such incidents where lack of regulation resulted in massive loss of human life and toll on victims that exists to date, this turnaround is rather surprising. That too, for it to have triggered by a judgement of the Supreme Court, an institution that has been a guardian of environment from the T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India case, where tree-felling and non-forestry activity in forests across the country was stopped by an order of the Supreme Court to the Niyamgiri hills case where indigenous Dongria Kondh tribe successfully fought against Vedanta Aluminium’s bauxite mining project, using the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006 to assert their cultural and religious rights over the sacred hills.[1]

Background: Tracing the Origins of “Prior” Clearance

To appreciate the magnitude of the conflict between the May 2025 and November 2025 Vanashakti judgments, it is essential to situate the dispute within the broader evolution of environmental constitutionalism in India.

In the wake of the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the catastrophic Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984, India developed a legal regime grounded in the “Precautionary Principle.” Interpreted by the Supreme Court as part of Article 21 (the Right to Life), this principle requires that environmental protection measures must anticipate, prevent, and address sources of environmental degradation before any damage occurs.

The principal mechanism for implementing this principle is the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification. Introduced in 1994 and updated in 2006, the EIA framework mandates that certain industrial and infrastructure projects must secure “prior” Environmental Clearance (EC) before any construction begins. The underlying rationale is that any environmental harm, such as deforestation or wetland destruction, is often irreversible. If assessments are conducted post-construction, they serve merely as a bureaucratic formality, failing to achieve the goal of sustainable development.

However, a significant gap has emerged between this normative ideal and the realities of India’s rapid industrialization, ready crony land grab. Successive governments, prioritising the “Ease of Doing Business,” began to grant “ex post facto” (retrospective) clearances to projects that had already commenced operations unlawfully. This practice created a moral hazard—companies found it cheaper to violate the law and pay penalties later than to undergo the rigorous and time-consuming process of prior assessment. The Vanashakti litigation originated when the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) attempted to formalize this practice through a 2017 Notification and a 2021 Office Memorandum (OM), thereby turning what was intended as amnesty into a standard procedure.

The May 2025 Judgment: The Normative Firewall

On May 16, 2025, a two-judge bench consisting of Justice Abhay S. Oka and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan delivered a judgment that aimed to uphold the “Rule of Law” over economic expediency.

Textualist Rigidity and the “Anathema” of Retrospection

The May judgment adopted a strict and literal interpretation of the EIA Notification 2006, holding that the requirement for “prior” EC is mandatory. Relying on precedents such as Common Cause v. Union of India (2017) and Alembic Pharmaceuticals v. Rohit Prajapati (2020), the bench emphasised that ex post facto clearances are “completely alien to environmental jurisprudence” and constitute an “anathema” to the EIA framework. Permitting operations without prior assessment, the Court reasoned, effectively condones violations. If EC is eventually denied after construction, the environmental harm is already irreversible; if granted, the “precautionary principle” is rendered meaningless.

The Sanctity of Executive Undertakings

The Court also scrutinised the legal history of the 2017 Notification, which had offered a six-month “amnesty” window for violators. When challenged before the Madras High Court, the Union Government had assured the court that this was a “one-time measure.” The May bench found that the subsequent 2021 OM—which perpetuated the amnesty indefinitely—breached this judicial undertaking. The Court held that the executive cannot renege on its assurance to the court, striking down the 2021 OM as arbitrary and violative of Article 14.[2]

Rejection of Monetary Regularisation

The May judgment explicitly rejected the notion that penalties under the “Polluter Pays Principle” could substitute for prior compliance. It noted that while Section 15 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 provides for penalties, it does not authorize the regularization of illegal structures. As a result, the Court held that even if penalties are paid, illegal constructions lacking prior clearance must be halted and demolished. The bench stressed that the “Polluter Pays Principle” cannot be twisted into a license to pollute.[3]

The November 2025 Review: The Pragmatic Recalibration

In a dramatic turnaround just six months later, a three-judge Review Bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai (with Justice Bhuyan dissenting) set aside the May judgment.

 The “Per Incuriam” Doctrine and the Battle of Precedents

The Review Bench invoked the doctrine of per incuriam—rendered in ignorance of binding law—to overturn the May judgment. The majority held that the May Bench had failed to consider coordinate bench decisions in Electrosteel Steels Ltd. (2021)[4], Pahwa Plastics (2022)[5], and D. Swamy (2023)[6].

The May Bench had relied on Common Cause and Alembic to assert that ex-post facto EC is illegal. The Review Bench argued that while Alembic described such clearances as “anathema,” it ultimately allowed industries to continue operating after paying fines.

The Review Bench interpreted the relief granted in Alembic (allowing the industry to operate) as the binding principle of law, whereas the May Bench considered the relief as an exceptional measure under Article 142, treating the prohibition on retrospective EC as binding law.

Ultimately, by prioritising Electrosteel—which stated that the Environment Protection Act “does not prohibit” ex post facto clearance—over the strict reading of Common Cause, the Review Bench found the May judgment erroneous for ignoring the more recent “balanced approach” adopted by the Court.[7]

2. The Doctrine of “National Assets” and Sunk Costs

Economic consequences were a decisive factor in the Review Judgment. The Court accepted the Union’s argument that the May judgment would require the demolition of “national assets” valued at over ₹20,000 crore.[8]

The Court cited specific examples such as the AIIMS hospital in Odisha (962 beds) and the greenfield airport in Vijayanagar as projects facing potential demolition.[9]

The Review Bench further argued that demolishing these large-scale projects would cause more environmental damage (from dust and debris) than allowing them to remain operational. The Court rhetorically questioned whether demolishing effluent treatment plants would truly benefit environmental protection.[10] This reasoning, in effect, used environmental concerns to justify non-enforcement of environmental law.

Statutory Flexibility

Contrary to the May judgment, the Review Bench held that Section 15 of the Environment Protection Act does not mandate demolition. The Act, according to the Review Bench, allows for flexibility, and the executive can “amend or modify” notifications as needed.[11] Thus, the 2021 OM was not seen as violating the “one-time” judicial undertaking but as a valid exercise of executive power, especially as it was issued following directions from the National Green Tribunal (NGT).

Analytical Critique: The Erosion of Certainty

The rapid shift between the Vanshakti verdicts reveals a deep schism within India’s environmental constitutionalism. While the Review Judgment saved billions in investment, it set a precarious precedent that undermines the rule of law in three key areas.

The Inversion of Stare Decisis (Precedent)

The main issue with the Review Judgment is its handling of precedent. Justice Bhuyan’s dissent pointed out that Electrosteel and Pahwa—relied on by the Review Bench—were two-judge bench decisions, as was Common Cause, which formed the foundation of the May judgment and offered a comprehensive interpretation of the EIA Notification.

The Review Bench declared the May judgment per incuriam for not following Electrosteel, but the dissent argued that Electrosteel itself was per incuriam for disregarding the binding principle established in Common Cause.[12]

The Review Bench’s position—that the relief granted in Alembic (allowing industries to continue) constitutes binding laws jurisprudentially problematic. The Supreme Court often uses its extraordinary powers under Article 142 to grant case-specific relief while maintaining a contrary legal principle. By elevating discretionary relief to binding precedent, the Review Judgment effectively legalises violations, signaling to lower courts that statutory prohibitions on retrospective clearance can be ignored when economic stakes are high.

The Institutionalisation of Fait Accompli

The Review Judgment entrenches the doctrine of Fait Accompli in Indian law, suggesting that violations on a sufficiently large scale become practically irreversible.

By explicitly referencing the ₹20,000 crore investment as a justification for recall, the Court signaled that the “Right to Environment” is subordinate to the “Right to Investment.” This creates a dangerous incentive for developers to proceed with construction and heavy investments before obtaining clearance, believing that courts will hesitate to order the destruction of “national assets.”

Moreover, the reasoning that demolition itself would cause pollution effectively shields all large-scale illegal infrastructure from enforcement. The further along illegal construction is, the more “environmentally damaging” it becomes to remove, thus guaranteeing its persistence. This undermines the “Precautionary Principle,” which is based on prevention rather than after-the-fact remediation.

Simply put, if the municipality of a city refrains from demolishing the encroachment buildings on banks of lakes, the city will be prone to flood and is exposed to more vulnerabilities than before. Vanshakti II judgement fully fails to engage with this very obvious and basic logic.

Conclusion: From Gatekeeper to Toll Collector

The shift from the May judgment to the November Review marks a transformation in the Supreme Court’s role in environmental governance. The May judgment sought to act as a Gatekeeper, upholding the “Prior Clearance” requirement to prevent environmental degradation before it occurs. In contrast, the Review Judgment recasts the Court as a Toll Collector, allowing violations to continue in exchange for fines and remedial actions.

While the Review Judgment provides a practical solution to the immediate issue of “stranded assets” such as the Odisha AIIMS and the Vijayanagar Airport, it causes enduring harm to the credibility of India’s environmental regulatory regime. It endorses the executive’s strategy of “dilution by notification,” where statutory mandates are weakened to accommodate industrial needs. Most significantly, it undermines the finality of Supreme Court judgments, implying that even environmentally protective verdicts can be recalled if the economic arguments are persuasive enough.

For developers, the message is unambiguous: compliance is optional, so long as one can afford the cost of post-facto forgiveness.

Amen.

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

[1] Orissa Mining Corporation Ltd vs Ministry Of Environment & Forest &Ors, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 180 of 2011

[2] Para 30, Vanshakti v. Union of India 2025 INSC 718 (Vanshakti I)

[3] Para 27, Vanshakti I

[4] Electrosteel Steels Limited v. Union of India and Others  (2023) 6 SCC 615

[5] Pahwa Plastics Private Limited and Another v. Dastak NGO and Others (2023) 12 SCC 774

[6] D. Swamy v. Karnataka State Pollution Control Board and Others (2023) 20 SCC 469

[7] Para 55.1, CREDAI vs. Vankshakti 2025 INSC 1326 (Vanshakti II)

[8] Para 108, Vanshakti II (CJI Gavai)

[9] Paras 109, 110, Vanshakti II (CJI Gavai)

[10] Para 7 (VIII), Vanshakti II (Justice K. Vinod Chandran)

[11] Para 75, Vanshakti II (CJI Gavai)

[12] Para 20, Vanshakti II (Justice Bhuyan)

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The post The Judicial Ouroboros: The Vanashakti Reversal & Crisis of Environmental Finality in India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The NACEJ has strongly condemned, what it terms as “the abject failure of the Government in systemically addressing the air pollution crisis and the brazen, arbitrary detention of peacefully protesting citizens, students, parents, environmentalists, workers and activists, who are courageously organizing against this public health catastrophe.” The Chief Minister (Rekha Gupta) owes a public apology to the protestors and the people of Delhi for the government’s failure, unjust detentions and use of police force against peaceful citizens. The NACEJ has called for withdrawal of cases registered, if any, against the protestors.

The indiscriminate action by authorities not only violates democratic rights, but also blatantly disregards the dire health emergency faced by millions in Delhi NCR, as air pollution soared to its highest levels in four years, especially following Diwali on October 21, 2025, as confirmed by official monitoring stations. In the backdrop of the severity of the issue, the short-sighted, politicised response of the government will only exacerbate the air pollution crisis further in Delhi NCR. 

The group has also demanded that the Delhi Government, the Union Government and all authorities must immediately, without delay or evasion, recognize the magnitude of this public health emergency and the legitimate outrage of the people of Delhi NCR, instead of treating it as a ‘law and order issue’ or a political blame game. This unchecked governance failure-fuelled has directly led to record-breaking pollution, with hazardous air choking the region and pushing public health to the brink.

Besides, the NACEJ has called all for urgent, transparent, and scientifically accountable actions; not repression and diversion, to protect the lives, rights, and dignity of every Delhi NCR resident. The Government needs to initiate year-round air pollution crisis management, built on long-term policy preparedness and a prioritization of public health and justice. It is high time for political and bureaucratic authorities to address the rightful angst of the people, setting aside political calculations and vested interests.

Despite years of crisis and public outcry, air pollution remains a severe and escalating public health hazard, with Delhi NCR and several other Indian cities suffering the world’s worst air quality. This crisis causes millions of preventable deaths and immense economic losses, while disproportionately impacting poor and marginalized communities, outdoor and informal workers, women, elders, children and those living in congested or industrial areas. Government actions have consistently excluded the most vulnerable, widening environmental injustice.

What is most alarming this year is that, despite clear evidence and expert warnings, the government prioritised appeasement-based political interests over scientific and public health advice, specifically legalizing the sale and use of so-called ‘green’ crackers for Diwali. This move led to rampant illicit use of fireworks, ignoring the Supreme Court’s limited hours order, leading to its weak implementation. The result was record-breaking PM2.5 levels and a dangerous spike in air pollution, with Delhi reporting levels as high as 675 µg/m³ (CPCB data) – the worst in four years.In parallel, non-compliance and apparent fudging of data such as the reported use of water sprinklers near AQI monitors to artificially lower recorded pollution further erode trust and delay meaningful action. The persistent blame games over stubble burning also do not address the reality, especially since, in 2025, its contribution to Delhi’s PM2.5 was notably lower than previous years. Year-round vehicle and industry emissions remain the primary drivers. Delhi’s pollution emergency demonstrates a deeper governance failure where populist politics has been allowed to overshadow public health and science-led environmental policy.

To genuinely address the roots of Delhi’s air pollution emergency, the following immediate and structural measures are essential:

• A time-bound, transparent policy and plan of action to reduce air toxicity and fixing answerability and accountability of all statutory authorities, as per law.

• Pro-active promotion and comprehensive upgrades to Delhi’s public transport as a clear alternative to odd-even private vehicle restrictions. Odd-even schemes are not novel and have demonstrated mixed results, while similar restrictions already exist as part of GRAP. What is urgently needed is a sharp pivot away from political optics and towards policies that truly discourage the daily use of private cars and SUVs by improving public transport and reducing road congestion through measures like congestion pricing.

• Differentiate between public transport modes: A renewed emphasis is needed on both bus and metro infrastructure, as well as the neglected surface rail network, which can provide cleaner, more inclusive mass transit, if upgraded and integrated into a unified transport system.

• Implementation of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes alongside metro enhancements, for high-frequency, accessible public bus services, rather than segregated bus lanes. Upgrading, expanding, and integrating these modes is essential for sharply reducing waiting times and increasing convenience for commuters.

• When calling for tackling vehicular pollution “at source,” new concrete measures are needed: leapfrogging to BS6 fuel and emission norms and promoting EVs are steps already taken. What is needed now is a rapid phase-out and strict control of all non-BS6 diesel vehicles in Delhi NCR, combined with the elimination of diesel fuel subsidies for non-commercial vehicles. Non-BS6 diesels remain a disproportionate source of PM2.5 and PM10 compared to petrol vehicles—despite diesel’s lower price, its use for private transport is now obsolete and counterproductive for clean air.

• Highlight the persistent neglect of Delhi’s extensive surface rail infrastructure. Investments and integration with bus and metro systems are urgently needed to maximize sustainable, mass transit and reduce the reliance on polluting road vehicles.

• Reference existing scientific source apportionment studies (IIT Kanpur 2023, etc.) that establish the root sources and their respective shares – vehicles, dust, construction, waste and industry, so that measures are not misdirected.

• A clearly statement that stubble burning is not a major year-round pollution source. Recent studies confirm its limited, seasonal contribution, while vehicle and industrial emissions remain chronic drivers of Delhi’s poor air quality. Victimising and vilifying farmers while subsidizing or ignoring much larger polluters like the automobile sector is unjust and must be stopped.

• A firmly implemented year-round ban on firecrackers and a credible transition plan for firework-industry workers. WTE incinerator plants, and all unchecked construction and waste burning, must be banned or relocated beyond residential and ecologically sensitive areas, given their toxic emissions. Scientific evidence fully rejects their ‘green’ branding while they continue to drive air toxicity and perpetuate health crises.

• Recognize innovations, but emphasize their futility when major pollution sources, notably ‘green’ WTEs and vehicular fleets, remain inadequately regulated and incentivized.

• Government must set up an effective and permanent mechanism for inputs from and dialogue with environmental, civil-society organizations and collectives.

• Government must release real-time, credible and accessible air-quality data and health advisories in different formats.

• Government must respond to peaceful protest calls with dialogue and not intimidation, threats, detentions and arrests of citizens and activists.

• People at large must reject any political or religious narrative that undermines or delays urgent public health actions in response to environmental emergencies.

In conclusion, the NACEJ has also called for a scientifically informed, health-centred, long-term air quality management framework for Delhi NCR and all Indian cities. This must feature enforceable bans on new WTE plants and place existing WTEs in the Red Category. Year-round prohibition on firecrackers, strict controls on construction and vehicular emissions (with a focus on outdated diesel vehicles), and a fundamental reorientation of urban, transport and industrial policy towards safeguarding public health are equally important. ‘Innovations’ and civil society efforts cannot succeed while major polluters remain unchecked and unaccountable, especially under the guise of ‘green’ solutions.

Addressing air pollution requires an integrated, inter-sectoral, institutional accountability approach rooted in public well-being and aligned with broader environmental, economic, and development goals. India’s future depends on putting public health, social and ecological justice and constitutional rights of all citizens at the very centre of all environmental and urban policymaking.

Signatories to the Statement: NACEJ Members: 

1. Alok Shukla, Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan, Raipur
2. Apoorv Grover, People for Aravallis, New Delhi
3. Dr. Babu Rao, Scientists for People, Telangana
4. Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran, Centre for Financial Accountability, Selam, Tamil Nadu
5. Disha A Ravi, Fridays for Future India
6. Dr. Gabriele Dietrich, Penn Urimay Iyakkam & NAPM, Madurai, Tamil Nadu
7. John Michael, NACEJ and NAPM Telangana
8. Krithika Dinesh, Legal researcher, NAJAR, Delhi
9. Medha Patkar, Narmada Bachao Andolan and NAPM, Madhya Pradesh
10. Meera Sanghamitra, NACEJ Telangana
11. Neelam Ahluwalia, Founder Member, People for Aravallis, Haryana
12. Nirmala Gowda, Mapping Malnad, Bengaluru
13. Prasad Chacko, Social Worker, Ahmedabad, Gujarat
14. Rajkumar Sinha, Bargi Bandh Visthapit Evam Prabhavit Sangh, Madhya Pradesh
15. Ramnarayan K, Natural History Educator and Independent Ecologist, Uttarakhand
16. Ravi S P, Chalakudypuzha Samrakshana Samithi, Kerala
17. Soumya Dutta, Movement for Advancing Understanding of Sustainability and Mutuality (MAUSAM) & NACEJ, New Delhi
18. Soutrik Goswami, Environmental Researcher and Activist, New Delhi
19. Stella James, Researcher and Independent consultant, Bengaluru, Karnataka
20. Dr. Suhas Kolhekar, NAPM & NACEJ (Pune, Maharashtra)
21. Sumit (For Himdhara Environment Research and Action Collective, Himachal Pradesh)
22. Tarini, Independent Filmmaker, Delhi
23. Yash, Environmental Rights Activist, New Delhi

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The post Say No to ‘Toxic Governance’: Arrest air pollution, not activists and protesters: NACEJ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

There is evidence that the Government is now going ahead full steam to pander to the advancement of these corridors, which have no demonstrated benefit to people at large, whether in Goa or in Karnataka. For a small state like Goa to have to lose its resources and become a ‘corridor’ towards the Corridor, spells complete disaster. Its air, waters, its rivers, its agriculture, its fishing and fish-drying spaces, its forests, its peoples’ health and livelihoods, are all under threat from coal dust and infrastructure being set up to make coal transportation through the port, roads, railways and waterways of Goa possible.   

The NAPM has also condemned the questionable legal architecture systematically introduced to facilitate these plans that enable corporate expansionism, even as existing laws and regulations around environmental protection, social impacts, land acquisition and rehabilitation are being violated.

In a statement issued yesterday, the NAPM has also joined the active people’s movements of Goa and Karnataka in resisting the reduction of the region to a coal transportation and corridors hub, and in their struggles to safeguard the ecology, livelihoods and people’s well-being, for current and future generations.

Goans have been demanding the de-notification of the rivers of Goa, which have been declared as National Waterways under the National Waterways Act, 2016. Similarly protesters have been demanding stoppage of the railway double-tracking project and return of lands acquired through draconian legislation.

NAPM further calls for an immediate halt to port expansion, by respecting the will of the people as even articulated in the public hearings in Mormugao taluka.

The people of Goa held a Chalo Lohia Maidan mass protest on Sunday November 9 in Goa.

Related:

NAPM condemns Delhi authorities for deserting over 700 Dhobi Ghat residents

NAPM condemns Delhi authorities for deserting over 700 Dhobi Ghat residents

The post Solidarity with protests of locals against projects facilitating coal transportation (Goa to Karnataka): NAPM appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A beginning was made by the 12th Finance Commission which allocated a total of ₹1000 crores for this purpose, which was termed a Green Bonus; the share of Himachal was a paltry ₹20 crores. Signatories to the communication are among those former bureaucrats “who have worked with the central and state governments and have come together to speak out on actions of the governments which we consider are against the interests of the people of India and/or in violation of the Indian Constitution.”

This idea of a Green Bonus must be amplified and taken forward by the 16th FC. The signatories that they have learned that the Himachal Chief Minister has taken up this matter of the creation of a  Green Fund or Green Bonus with the 16^th Finance Commission on June 6, 2025, requesting for an outlay of ₹50000 crores for incentivising the mountain states. This proposal must be considered seriously; the additional devolutions would go a long way towards ameliorating their financial condition and removing their present compulsion to ruthlessly exploit their forest and ecological capital to meet budget deficits and development expenditure.

Himalayan states like Himachal, Uttarakhand, Kashmir and Sikkim are slowly going to pieces, literally, under the onslaught of cloudbursts, flash floods, land subsidence and collapsing infrastructure. In just the last four years (2022-2025) Himachal has lost 1200 lives and suffered a loss of ₹18000 crores in these disasters (and this does not include the indirect loss to trade and economic activities). The position of Uttarakhand is even more dire: in just the last ten years (as of 2022) it has recorded 18464 “natural disasters” in which 3554 lives were lost (not including the colossal number of deaths in the Kedarnath disaster of 2013). We have not been able to lay our hands on the total financial/economic loss caused, but an indication is available in the official figures of the Kedarnath calamity: US$ 3.8 billion. Just this year, 2025, the economic losses are estimated at ₹5000 crores.

The entire text of the crucial letter may be read here:

To

Dr. Arvind Panagariya

Chairman, 16^th Finance Commission

Cc: Members of the Finance Commission

Secretary, Finance Commission

Dear Dr. Panagariya,

We are a group of former civil servants who have worked with the central and state governments and have come together as the Constitutional Conduct Group to speak out on actions of the governments which we consider are against the interests of the people of India and/or in violation of the Indian Constitution. We are not affiliated to any political party, individually or collectively.

2. The 16^th Finance Commission, which you head, is in the midst of interacting with various state governments and formulating its recommendations for the devolution of funds from the Centre to the states. We feel that this is an appropriate time to bring to your notice a vital issue concerning the environmental integrity and very survival of some of our northern states, which has not received the attention it merits in this era of global warming and climate change. Previous Finance Commissions have, at best, made only a passing mention of it, but it now deserves to be brought to the forefront of your deliberations.
3. Himalayan states like Himachal, Uttarakhand, Kashmir and Sikkim are slowly going to pieces, literally, under the onslaught of cloudbursts, flash floods, land subsidence and collapsing infrastructure. In just the last four years (2022-2025) Himachal has lost 1200 lives and suffered a loss of ₹18000 crores in these disasters (and this does not include the indirect loss to trade and economic activities). The position of Uttarakhand is even more dire: in just the last ten years (as of 2022) it has recorded 18464 “natural disasters” in which 3554 lives were lost (not including the colossal number of deaths in the Kedarnath disaster of 2013). We have not been able to lay our hands on the total financial/economic loss caused, but an indication is available in the official figures of the Kedarnath calamity: US$ 3.8 billion. Just this year, 2025, the economic losses are estimated at ₹5000 crores. Whether these are natural disasters, as the central and state governments would like us to believe, or man-made disasters, is debatable; but we are not delving into that aspect for now. We are on a larger and more fundamental point: can the country afford the destruction of the Himalayas and do these Himalayan states need help?
4. North India and its Gangetic plain would not survive without the forests, the glaciers and rivers that originate from Himachal, Kashmir and Uttarakhand, and would soon become a desert: these rivers sustain a population of almost 400 million people and are a lifeline for many cities. The Himalaya Hindukush ranges help to moderate the climate, enable the monsoon precipitation and snow that recharge the rivers every year. They contain some of Hinduism’s most revered religious shrines and pilgrimages. They are the green lungs which enable north India to breathe and provide relief to 40 million tourists every year. We cannot afford to lose this landscape.
5. But losing them we are, mainly because of financial compulsions. Himalayan states suffer from a double whammy: on the one hand they are revenue deficit because they have limited sources of income. They have no industrial or manufacturing base, services sector or surplus agriculture (other than some fruit crops), employment creation potential is limited. On the other hand, the cost of providing basic development to the people is much higher than that of the plains because of topographical, connectivity and climatic reasons. The only low hanging source of income they have are their natural resources – the forests and rivers – and these are therefore being exploited ruthlessly for hydel projects and tourism, causing immense damage to the ecology, and resulting in the death and destruction we have been witnessing in the last few years (Himachal and Uttarakhand have diverted 11000 and 50000 hectares, respectively, of dense forests for various non-forestry projects in the last 20 years alone). According to successive State of the Forest Reports the denudation of forests in the north-eastern Himalayan states is even more severe. The disastrous, and predictable, consequences of the depletion of green cover is being further exacerbated by climate change which is drastically altering the hydrology of the rivers, accelerating glacial melt and the threat of GLOF (Glacial Lake Outburst Flood). The increased incidence of EWEs (Extreme Weather Events), landslides, flash floods, land subsidence is, according to the available science, directly attributable to this combination of over-development and climate change. This reckless squandering of their natural assets must be stopped in the national interest.
6. The irony, and tragedy, is that this need not be a zero-sum game, if only the central government and Finance Commissions were to recognise the real wealth and contribution of these states to the national economy and well-being, and compensate them accordingly. According to a 2025 report of the Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, the total forest wealth of Himachal was valued at ₹9.95 lakh crores. The report calculated the annual Total Economic Value (TEV) of Himachal’s forests at ₹3.20 lakh crores; this includes ₹1.65 lakh crores for carbon sequestration, ₹68941 crores for eco-system services, ₹32901 crores as the value of bio-diversity, ₹15132 crores for water provisioning and ₹3000 crores for regulatory services such as flood control and sediment retention. We are not aware if the other Himalayan states have carried out similar surveys but they would be on similar lines. These contributions benefit the whole nation, not just these states. Unfortunately, these are neither acknowledged nor taken into account while disbursing central assistance to the states.
7. But this must change. Himachal (and other Himalayan states) must be compensated by the central government for their non-monetary, but vital, contribution to the country’s wellbeing, quality of life and in sectors like agriculture, climate control, hydel power, carbon capture and tourism. The mechanism to do so already exists – the Finance Commissions, which determine the formula for devolving central funds to the states. A beginning was made by the 12th Finance Commission which allocated a total of ₹1000 crores for this purpose, which was termed a Green Bonus; the share of Himachal was a paltry ₹20 crores.
8. This idea must be amplified and taken forward by the 16th FC. We learn that the Himachal Chief Minister has taken up this matter of the creation of a Green Fund or Green Bonus with you on the June 6, 2025, requesting for an outlay of ₹50000 crores for incentivising the mountain states. This proposal must be considered seriously; the additional devolutions would go a long way towards ameliorating their financial condition and removing their present compulsion to ruthlessly exploit their forest and ecological capital to meet budget deficits and development expenditure.
9. In this regard, we would like to make two methodology- related suggestions for your consideration:

[1] The current (15^th FC) weightage given for Forests and Ecological services is only 10%. This is wholly inadequate considering the imperatives of climate control goals and only dis-incentivises states from bringing more area under green cover. This weightage needs to be increased to at least 20%; the additional 10% can be located by reducing the weightages for some of the other indicators. For example, weightage for Population should be brought down from 15% to 10% as there is a contradictory logic in allocating a higher weightage for population than for Demographic Performance (currently 12.5 %). Similarly, the weightage for Income Distance could be reduced to 35% from the current 45% (which penalises states with higher per capita incomes).

[2] The present methodology for calculating the area under Forests and Ecology is faulty and disadvantages the mountain states insofar as it excludes the area above the tree line. Much of their geographical area lies above the tree line and comprises of snowfields, alpine pastures and glaciers. These areas are vital natural habitats for many rare and endangered species of animals and have a unique ecological value. They also function as the “water towers” that charge the river denying them their ecological value in the weightage matrix is illogical and self-contradictory. These areas should be included in the definition of forests.

10. We are strongly of the view, however, that the Himalayan states should not be given a free pass with the Green Bonus as finally decided by the Commission. Release of these funds should be indexed to improvement in environmental parameters, sustainability of development and tourism projects, protection of rivers, framing of proper urban development and building plans, and curbing of illegal mining and construction. You would no doubt be aware that the Supreme Court too has taken serious note of the environmental devastation in Himachal Pradesh and has said that at this rate the state would “vanish from the map of India”.
11. We earnestly hope that your Commission too shares this concern and would also play a role in ensuring that the Court’s fears do not come true. Protecting the Himalayas has to be seen as a shared responsibility, not as the concern of the mountain states alone. If the Himalayas lose their forests, rivers and glaciers it won’t be long before north India goes the way of the Indus Valley civilisation.

SATYAMEVA JAYATE

With deep regards,

Yours sincerely,

Constitutional Conduct Group (103 signatories) 

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The post Stop destruction of Himalayas, potential desertification of Gangetic plain, compensate Himalayan states for climate control, carbon capture etc.: Former Civil Servants appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The new Government of India (GoI) rules exempt approximately 79% of India’s coal-fired power plants (those over 10 km from major/densely polluted cities) from installing FGDs, while 11% near critically polluted areas face case-by-case reviews. Only about 10% of plants within dense urban areas like Delhi-NCR must comply, with an extended deadline of December 2027—an effective 12-year delay.

Critics question the logic of an urban-rural divide, highlighting that pollutants like Sulphur dioxide (SO2) from coal plants, which convert into harmful secondary PM2.5 linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, do not respect geographical boundaries. An independent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air

(CREA) revealed that SO2 accounts for 12-30% of PM2.5 and that the rollback will undermine public health, despite claims of low ambient SO2 levels.

The report emphasizes that 462 plants (78% of units) are now fully exempt, even though studies show FGDs reduce sulfate aerosol concentration by 10-20% up to 200 km away. The short half-life of SO2, transforming rapidly into hazardous PM2.5 and sulfuric acid, underscores the urgency of pollution control. This move stands in stark contrast to the principles of the MC Mehta case, which established “polluter pays,” while the current policy seems to enable “polluter profits.”

Economically, the rollback is seen as regressive. While the government cites high costs (₹2.4 lakh crore nationwide) and minor CO2 increases from FGDs, experts argue that these deferred costs will translate into a substantial public health bill, including increased healthcare expenditure, lost productivity, and premature deaths. Data indicates a rising trend in deaths attributed to coal-fired power plants, potentially exceeding 3 lakh in 2024.

“We dare the Government to place a financial value on these potentially one and a half million deaths over the last decade,” states the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA). “Even if we take the figure of Rs. 1 crore paid to each victim of the recent Air-India plane crash in Ahmedabad, the total cost would come to about ₹15 lakh crore – 6 times more than the cost of installing FGDs nationwide.”

Furthermore, the decision jeopardizes significant investments already made. India committed over US30 billion for FGDs under the 2015 plan, with NTPC alone having spent approximately US4 billion. This rollback could undermine these investments, discourage future environmental upgrades, and signal a concerning trend of easing environmental norms under the guise of “ease of business.”

Such actions, driven by corporate lobbying from entities like Adani, Reliance, and Jindal, as revealed by the Reporters Collective, prioritize financial gains for a few over public welfare. This contrasts sharply with the automobile industry, which has seen stringent emission norms implemented consistently, even leapfrogging to BS VI standards, with industry support and higher costs for consumers but cleaner emissions.

“The bottom line is that the rollback of FGD rules is a shortsighted, unhealthy, and economically flawed move,” the CFA stresses. “It sacrifices Indian lives by boosting particulate air pollution with long-term consequences, while giving the illusion of cost savings. In reality, those savings will be eroded by skyrocketing health expenditure, lost lives and productivity, and the costs of retroactive cleanup, besides stalling India’s clean-energy trajectory.”

The organization demands the Union Government reinstate and fast-track FGD installation across all coal-fired plants, mandate CO2 and PM2.5 accounting in cost evaluations of pollution-control technology, and align with the National Clean Air Programme and global climate goals. The CFA concludes that this rollback trades immediate industrial cost relief for chronic public health degradation, economic leakage, and a derailed transition to cleaner energy, urging a pivot back toward strict, science-driven pollution standards.

Courtesy: CounterView

The post Polluter profits? Corporate lobbying behind GoI coal power plants emission rules relaxation appeared first on SabrangIndia.