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

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

Only One Hour for the Ajmer Hearing

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

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

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

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

No Genuine Effort to Involve the Public

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

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

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

Aravalli Cannot Be Discussed Without Those Who Live and Work There

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

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

Concerns over the Composition of the High-Level Committee

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

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

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

“Mining Lobby Creates an Unsafe Atmosphere”

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

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

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

Demands for a Genuine and Comprehensive Process were made

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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

Whose ‘ENVIRONMENT’ is it, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can they not organize cleaning drives with community help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reaching Confluences is Extremely Difficult

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

The Crisis Facing the Kho River

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

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

– Ban all mining on the Kho River

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

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

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

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

Related:

Understanding Uttarakhand’s ‘pain’ of ‘development’, the bane of religious and wild life tourism

Morbi reflects the ‘revadi culture’ of the Gujarat Model

Periyar the icon of social justice and humanism

The post Environment: The growing crisis on the Kho River 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.

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

Unending Adjudication: The Vanashakti reversal and environmental finality in India

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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

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An action research report, “Invited Disaster: Khadi Floods in Surat City”, published by two civil rights groups, Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Surat, states that nearly half of Gujarat’s top urban conglomerate—known for its concentration of textile and diamond polishing industries—is affected by the dumping of debris and solid waste, along with the release of treated and untreated sewage into the khadis (rivulets), thereby increasing the risk of flood disaster.

Conducted by two post-graduate students from Azim Premji University, Avadhut Atre and Buddhavikas Athawale, with assistance from environmental lawyer Krishnakant Chauhan, architect Sugeet Pathakji, environmentalist Rohit Prajapati, and urban planner Neha Sarwate, the study is based on field observations of the khadis passing through the South Gujarat town.

Using available secondary data, the study corroborates and confirms observed changes in these rivulets—intended as natural stormwater drainage channels for the urban area—through historical satellite images from Google Earth and interviews with stakeholders.

According to the study, authorized and unauthorized constructions, land reclamation along khadis, and resectioning and remodeling of khadi flows have severely compromised their capacity to carry stormwater. “In many areas in Surat city, smaller natural waterways have been levelled and converted into roads to facilitate traffic flow, overlooking the critical need for smooth stormwater drainage,” it asserts.

The study notes, “It can be said that the rainwater falling in city areas is unable to exit due to the ‘development’ of the city. The flooding of khadis impacts the eastern part of Surat city, affecting over 50% of Surat’s population. The textile trade also suffers during flooding, leading to economic losses.”

It estimates that khadi floods affect East Zone A, East Zone B, South East Zone, South Zone, and South West Zone, which collectively house approximately 43,75,207 of Surat’s total 82,32,085 residents.

More alarmingly, the study points out that the khadis are fed by discharges from sewage treatment plants. Moreover, numerous illegal outlets release both domestic and industrial effluents into the khadis. In fact, the city’s expanding periphery contributes untreated sewage into these waterways.

Containing a large collection of Google Earth images—compared from 2011 through 2025—of several rivulets such as Mithi Khadi, Koyali Khadi, Bhedwad Khadi, and Kankara Khadi, the study criticizes the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) for undertaking desilting as part of pre-monsoon preparedness “without due caution,” which, it claims, harms floodplain areas and reduces the capacity of the khadis to handle excess monsoon water.

One such example is a bridge over Mithi Khadi, now surrounded by a high wall over land that previously acted as a floodplain. Landfilling has raised the terrain above the natural flood level, pushing water toward other low-lying areas. “The obstruction around the bridge hampers smooth flow of water during the monsoon,” the report says.

The study further observes that construction and reclamation have reduced floodplain areas and the width of khadi stretches. Dumping and landfilling have drastically altered the elevation profile. At one site, a compound wall built in 2018 has resulted in the khadi being embanked by a concrete wall, shrinking its original area.

At another site, textile waste is directly dumped into the khadi, while accumulated solid waste and soil significantly hinder water flow. “A sewage outlet was observed discharging domestic and chemical wastewater—particularly from nearby units—into the khadi.”

Focusing on Koyali Khadi, the report notes that road construction over it restricts natural water dispersion, causing severe waterlogging in the surrounding areas during monsoon. Particularly concerning is the ongoing project from Bhathena Naher bridge to Jeevan Jyot bridge, where the khadi is being fully concretized, drastically reducing its natural capacity.

The researchers warn, “With little to no space for excess water to flow or merge into other channels, this development poses a high risk of urban flooding and long-term stagnation during monsoons.” They add that the silt removed during desilting is often dumped on the banks, only to wash back into the khadi during heavy rain.

A comparative analysis of Google satellite imagery from 2011 to 2025 at Saniya Hemad village, located on Surat’s fringe, reveals “a noticeable alteration in the khadi’s flow pattern.” The 2011 image shows a naturally meandering khadi, while the 2025 image reveals a straightened course.

“Although this engineered modification may appear efficient in the short term, it shortens flow duration and reduces water retention, diminishing both ecological and flood-buffering functions,” the researchers highlight.

Near the Raghuvir Trade Market on Bhavani Road, earlier imagery showed a visible khadi flow, which by 2025 has vanished due to construction. Built-up structures over the khadi’s path have obstructed this natural drainage, increasing the risk of urban flooding.

Examining the impact of development on water flow, the study notes that the Bhedwad Khadi followed a wider, more continuous path in 2011. By 2025, construction near Bamroli cricket ground has narrowed its course and reduced its flow capacity.

It adds that near the Dindoli Water Treatment Plant, the Bhedwad Khadi’s course has been significantly altered and straightened for aesthetic reasons, severely compromising its natural flow.

In the area around Om Industrial Estate in Saroli, researchers found the khadi’s path constantly shifting. Its older flow, once almost gone, reappeared in 2025 imagery. “Taming a khadi and constructing concrete embankments drastically alters its natural behavior,” they say, “leading to unintended consequences such as heavy silt accumulation.”

At the Kankara biodiversity park, a 2016 image shows the right bank of Kankara Khadi concretized with a diaphragm wall. The park and a road were built by raising the land level. By 2025, both banks have diaphragm walls, eliminating the khadi’s natural meander and floodplains.

Further, near Gabheni village on the city outskirts, the khadi’s course has changed due to drastic land use alterations. “Legal and illegal shrimp farms have contributed to this change. Industrial waste dumping here has led to severe water and soil pollution,” the report adds.

During fieldwork, most respondents identified poor stormwater drainage as the key issue. “Drains are too narrow, broken, or absent in some areas,” the study says. These are further clogged by solid waste, particularly plastic, discarded by residents and industries.

Shopkeepers highlighted the lack of regular SMC clean-up. They reported repeated losses during monsoon, as inventories are damaged and earnings suffer. Businesses shut down for days due to prolonged water stagnation.

In low-lying markets, encroachment on khadi banks and lack of flood management lead to backflow during heavy rainfall. Locals noted a rise in unseasonal rains, aggravating waterlogging. Builders acknowledged that unplanned urbanization has severely disrupted the city’s hydrology.

“Residents, particularly near Koyali and Mithi khadi, emphasized the interlinkage among the khadis. When Kankara Khadi overflows, water backflows into Mithi Khadi, causing flooding in homes. This is devastating in low-lying areas with poor housing,” the study notes.

“Loss of income is the most immediate impact,” residents report. For shopkeepers and daily wage earners, flooding forces closures for several days. One woman said, “I am the sole earner. When it floods, work halts for 4–5 days. My shop remains shut for a week. We then rely on SMC for food and water.”

Mobility is another major issue. Waterlogged streets restrict access to work and healthcare. Children miss school, and both public and private transport becomes unreliable due to submerged roads.

The report concludes by stressing health risks. Waterborne diseases like fever, diarrhea, and skin infections, along with vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria, increase after khadi floods. Residents mentioned rising medical expenses, adding strain to financially stressed households. “Stagnant water near homes, especially by khadi banks, becomes mosquito breeding grounds, worsening health conditions,” it warns.

Courtesy: CounterView

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One village I particularly remember is because of the great enthusiasm and happiness I saw among the people, particular women, due to the recently taken up water conservation efforts which had improved their life in a very significant ways. This is Markhera village of Tikamgarh district (Madhya Pradesh) in Central India. People of this village had been facing increasing difficulties due to water shortages. Water table was declining and water level in wells was going down too. Hand pumps were often reduced to just a trickle. As women here bear most water related responsibilities, their drudgery in fetching water from more distant places increased. Many of them had back ache from drawing water which was too low down in wells.

It is in this condition that a social activist named Mangal Singh contacted villagers. He told them that the organisation he belonged to (SRIJAN) had a program of digging saucer shaped structures in water courses or seasonal water flows so that some of the rain water would remain in them for a much longer time for the dry season. As this is exactly what the villagers needed, they agreed readily.

When this work was taken up, villagers could also take the silt that was use it for bund construction in their fields. The main benefit from the conservation of water in the newly constructed structures, called dohas, started being visible all too soon. Soon the demand for more dohas upstream and downstream came up. These benefited more and more farmers including those in neighbouring villages.

While this work was being taken up the activists developed a closer relationship with the community and together they reached an understanding that to get fuller benefits, several broken structures (like check dam gates) of previous water conservation work taken up by the government in the past also needed to be repaired. Here again the initial results were so encouraging, with substantial benefits of increased water availability resulting from an expenditure of just INR 20,000 (about 250 US dollars) at one repair site, that there were demands for repairing other structures upstream and downstream of this. When this work was also completed, the water scene of the village changed from one of acute scarcity to abundance.

As I learnt from several villagers, many more farmers are now able to irrigate their farms properly and crop yield has increased for several of them by about 50% or so. Some of them are able to plant take an additional crop as well. The water level in wells and hand-pumps has risen so that drinking water too can be obtained more easily. Women do not have to spend much time in getting essential supplies of water, nor do they have to take up very tiring work. It has even been possible to obtain the water needed for creating a beautiful forest, not far from the water course and the main repair work site, which in turn would also contribute to water conservation. As a young farmer Monu Yadav said, the benefits have been many-sided and far reaching. One of the less obvious but nevertheless important gains in fact relates to increased cooperation for tasks of common benefit. As the benefits of dohas would be lost after a few years if these are not cleaned and not maintained properly, groups of farmers have been formed with farmers closest to a doha being made collectively responsible for maintenance work.

Such small-scale water conservation work can be very cost effective. The entire work of repairs and pits at this place has cost just around INR 400,000 (about 5000 US dollars) or so while many-sided and durable benefits have spread to several villages. In fact in its entire planning for water conservation work SRIJAN has emphasised low-cost works such as doha pits as well as repair and renovation of already existing structures. In neighboring Niwari district, the experience of dohas dug in Gulenda village water-channel has been particularly encouraging.

Another benefit of such small scale water conservation works is that in such cases the prospects of involving the community in planning and implementation and benefitting from their tremendous knowledge of local conditions are immense and therefore such small water conservation schemes are invariably more creative and successful compared to big, costly, centralized ones.

Till just about five years ago, in Nadna village of Shivpuri district (Madhya Pradesh) the situation for most households was quite distressing. As several women of this village related recently in a group discussion, most of the rainwater rapidly flowed away from the village quite rapidly on sloped land, leaving hardly anything for the longer dry season ahead and contributing very little to water recharge. What is more, on the sloped land the rapid water torrents carried away a lot of the fertile topsoil as well.

With all the rainwater being lost quickly and even carrying away fertile soil, the farm productivity in the village was very low, and in fact very little could be grown in the season devoid of monsoon rains. Some of the land even remained uncultivated. In this village located in Pichore block, water scarcity remained a constraint not just for farming but also for animal husbandry. Not just villagers and their animals, but wild life also suffered due to water scarcity.

Due to low development prospects in farm and animal husbandry based livelihoods, people of this village, particularly those from poorer households, were becoming heavily dependent on migrant labour. The work which most of the migrants from here could get was frequently exploitative and also uncertain, but due to lack of alternatives, villagers had to resort to this as a survival mechanism despite all the distress and difficulties they suffered.

However about four years back a number of water conservation steps were initiated in this village. These included the creation of bunds and digging of small ponds in fields and construction of a gavian structure to keep a good part of rainwater in the village. In the two nullahs which drain the rainwater, about 80 spots were selected in consultation with the local villagers for digging dohas.

All this helped to conserve rainwater at many places but in addition also increased the overall water level in the village and its wells so that it has become possible to get more water more easily from wells and hand-pumps. Now farm animals as well as wild animals can find more water to drink even in dry months. Moisture conservation has resulted in the sprouting of more grass and related greenery, resulting in better grazing for animals.

At the same time, farm productivity has gone up. Now there is more cultivation of non-monsoon crops like wheat and in addition some of the land left more or less uncultivated earlier has also been brought under cultivation now. With soil erosion being checked too, soil quality is getting better. As a result of all this the dependence of villagers on exploitative migrant labour has reduced considerably.

The situation in Umrikhurd village in this district has also changed in a somewhat similar way, thanks to the digging of farm ponds and dohas as well as the creation of bunds in farms. An additional livelihood of pond fisheries has also emerged. As women related happily in a recent group discussion, now you can find water at several places where earlier it used to be dry by now.

These initiatives in the two villages of Shivpuri district were taken up by SRIJAN voluntary organization with support from Axis Bank Foundation and IndusInd Bank. The trust and involvement of these communities is also evident from their willingness to contribute their share of voluntary work as well as some economic resources.

In many villages of Bundekhand region of Central India, SRIJAN implemented a special program called BIWAL (Bundelkhand Initiative for Water, Agriculture and Livelihoods), also involving other leading voluntary organizations of the region in its implementation. In this initiative water conservation has been well integrated to improvement of soil and increase of farm yield by mobilizing the village community for a simple program.

In Bundelkhand region, comprising 14 districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh states, a very important contribution to water conservation has been made historically by well-constructed water tanks some of which go back to about 1000 years or even more. The ABV Institute of Good Governance has identified nearly 1100 such tanks. However several of them have become heavily filled with silt due to cleaning and de-silting work having been neglected for years. In this situation SRIJAN offered to arrange the de-silting work while farmers volunteered to carry away the mounds of highly fertile silt taken out from the tanks to their fields. As silt was taken out, the capacity of tanks to retain more rainwater increased. As more fertile silt was deposited in farms, the chances of making a success of natural farming, without using chemical fertilizers, increased.  Hence both the tasks of water conservation and farm improvement were well integrated. While SRIJAN and Arunodaya organizations initiated this work in Baura village of Mahoba district (Uttar Pradesh), a community organization was formed to take this forward and later the community came forward to take to take up the de-silting work on its own.

This approach was particularly useful in the Karauli district (Rajasthan) where in the rocky land of Makanpurswami village, deposition of a lot of fertile silt led to many acres of unproductive land becoming cultivable, again providing a great example of linking water conservation and improvements in farming. Here the villagers had initiated water conservation work on their own but the arrival of SRIJAN helped and motivated them to take it up on a much bigger scale.

In Teen Pokhar village land and soil conditions are difficult and wild animals also disrupt farming, but several farmers are hopeful even in these difficult conditions as SRIJAN and other voluntary organizations have created several new pokhars or ponds in the village apart from repairing earlier ones. Several of these are linked to each other so that excess of one can flow to another. In Rawatpura village of this district, the once difficult situation is now looking even more hopeful as the creation of several new ponds has made it possible to take farming to more and more land that could not be cultivated earlier.

These are only some examples of villages where the optimum utilisation of relatively quite low budgets led to very significant improvements in water conservation, bringing many-sided benefits to villagers and in some cases changing the situation of villagers from despair to hope. These achievements of water conservation are also very useful in terms of contributing to climate change adaptation.

(The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Man over Machine, Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril and A Day in 2071)      

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These are questions which sometimes excite the passions of people on all sides. Politicians can inflame these feeling further. A statement that is very often made by many of them has been—I’ll not give even a drop of extra water to the other side.

Those who are asked to mediate and find workable solutions for settling the disputes are also often impacted by this rhetoric. They are more concerned with somehow finding a solution that will satisfy all sides or at least lead to a common meeting ground, even if this is at the cost of sacrificing significant aspects of protecting river ecology.

Politicians and pressure groups have shrill voices, however rivers and fish cannot speak in ways that would be heard by decision makers. Hence the side of protecting river ecology and river life often remains unrepresented at river talks. In the USA and some other countries sometimes indigenous communities have been coming forward to speak for protecting rivers and river-life including endangered species.

Technocrats who are often given important roles in taking decisions on river projects often do not have a great understanding of river ecology. They often take decisions in favor of excessive river water exploitation including diversion and long-distance transfer, regardless of adverse impacts on river ecology. They are supported in this by big business interests.

In the prevailing conditions of decision making two important aspects are likely to be neglected. Firstly, any river in the course of its natural flow and free flow also fulfils very important ecological functions. Secondly, while transfer of water over vast distances is often justified in the name of ending water scarcity of some areas, it is often forgotten that more ecologically protective, sustainable and less costly local solutions are also generally available.

Instead of constructing many big projects on a river and thereby impeding its free flow, causing several adverse social and ecological impacts, a much better alternative is to take up several small structures, bunds and afforestation projects to save as much rain water as possible at the local level, contributing to water security of various villages, helping to maintain water balance all around the year and reducing considerably the harm from floods as well as droughts. Time honored methods of water harvesting and conservation, based on specific conditions of various regions, are often available and highly creative efforts based on them have been giving very useful results at low cost in several places.

Technocrats supported by big construction companies sometimes tend to push back the scientifically established reality, well-recognized by common people, that free-flowing rivers provide many significant benefits and useful services to people and settlements all along their flow. Apart from supporting many species of fish and water life as well as river bank related biodiversity, free-flowing rivers provide irrigation water and water for many other uses to people and all forms of life. They contribute to maintaining proper groundwater levels over a vast stretch of land. They deposit fertile silt to support low-cost bountiful farming and animal husbandry. They support livelihoods related to growing several kinds of fruits and vegetables that grows best in river bank conditions, as well as livelihoods related to boats and fisheries. In the lower reaches while approaching the sea, they play a crucial role in stabilizing and supporting ecology and biodiversity of coastal areas, mangroves and deltas.

Once all this is recognised in much better ways it follows that river engineering in the form of dams, barrages and embankments by changing, depleting or restricting river flows in various ways can have adverse effects on all these beneficial roles of free-flowing rivers, apart from bringing several unintended new adverse impacts and risks.

While all these factors, whether recognized adequately or not, have always been significant, their importance has increased further in times of climate change which have introduced several more uncertainties and risks.

Hence long overdue changes relating to understanding of rivers and river-projects are needed, so that there can be much better planning for protecting rivers and utilizing their water for various beneficial purposes while minimizing adverse impacts and risks.

(The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071)     

The post There should be more concern for protecting rivers than for just trying to get a higher share of their water appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Protests at the main gate of #UniversityOfHyderabad… targetting @TelanganaCMO @revanth_anumula @RahulGandhi over decision of #TGIIC Telangana Industrial Infrastructure Corporation to auction 400 acres of #KanchaGachibowli; the sloganeering, energy, visuals tell their own story pic.twitter.com/m74ykqhYjL

— Uma Sudhir (@umasudhir) April 1, 2025

Protesting students of #HCU have shared this video… they say this is of trucks moving in and out of the main gate , carrying the wood logs of trees that have been cut… Am told this was shot at 2 am … On @ndtv at 8 am, #exclusive footage of denuded #EastCampus @HydUniv pic.twitter.com/OxijZVdomB

— Uma Sudhir (@umasudhir) April 3, 2025

Videos shared by #HCU students with @ndtv, with time & location watermark, to show that JCBs continued to do work of clearing the #KancheGachibowli land parcel despite stay orders from #TelanganaHC to stop vegetation removing activity till court disposes petition to be heard tmrw pic.twitter.com/ZTBmnFIQQM

— Uma Sudhir (@umasudhir) April 2, 2025

pic.twitter.com/6zSf2fi0QH

— Tribal Army (@TribalArmy) April 3, 2025

The Telangana government’s handling of the situation has been marked by opacity, brute force, and suppression of dissent. Despite the Hyderabad Central University’s historical claim over the land and the petitions pending to be heard by Constitutional Courts, the Congress-led administration bulldozed ahead with its plans, using police to clamp down on protests. Students and environmental activists were detained for attempting to join the agitation, while the government dismissed the outcry as “misinformation” and “political opportunism.” Meanwhile, the opposition BRS, led by K.T. Rama Rao, has accused Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s administration of hypocrisy, recalling Congress’s past stance on Aarey forest in Mumbai. Yet, even Congress’s student wing, NSUI, has taken a cautious approach, criticising the government’s failure to secure the land while stopping short of outright opposition.

The administration’s justifications—promises of Rs 50,000 crore in investments and five lakh jobs—fail to address the reckless environmental destruction underway. Officials insist that the land is not classified as forest, yet the Supreme Court’s observations suggest otherwise, raising concerns about procedural violations and potential contempt of court. The government’s relentless push for rapid development, without transparency or public consultation, has turned the issue into a flashpoint of governance failure. Now, with the highest court stepping in, the Telangana government finds itself cornered—forced to defend its actions in what has become a battle between unchecked urbanisation and judicial oversight.

Supreme Court proceedings on Kancha Gachibowli tree felling on April 3, 2025

Post-Lunch Developments: Expressing shock over the large-scale deforestation in the Kancha Gachibowli area of Hyderabad, the Supreme Court issued an immediate order halting all development activities in the region. The bench, comprising Justice B.R. Gavai and Justice A.G. Masih, took suo-moto cognisance of the matter on the same day and directed that no activity, except measures to protect the remaining trees, should take place until further notice.

The court strongly emphasised compliance, warning that any violation of its directive would lead to the personal liability of the Chief Secretary of Telangana. To ensure transparency, the bench ordered the Chief Secretary to submit a detailed affidavit addressing the following concerns:

1. What was the compelling urgency that necessitated the developmental activities, including large-scale tree removal, in the disputed area?
2. Did the state government obtain the mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) certification before commencing the project?
3. Were the requisite permissions from forest authorities or any other relevant local bodies obtained before felling the trees?
4. What was the rationale behind including specific officers in the committee constituted by the Telangana government, particularly those who seemingly have no role in identifying forest areas?
5. What is the state government’s plan for the felled trees?

Earlier in the day, the court had passed an interim order staying further tree felling and directed the Telangana High Court’s Registrar (Judicial) to conduct an on-site inspection and submit a report by 3:30 PM. When the case was resumed at 3:45 PM, the Supreme Court reviewed the report and found it to be deeply alarming. The inspection revealed that large-scale deforestation was underway, with heavy machinery such as JCBs being used to clear hundreds of acres. The court also noted images showing peacocks and deer fleeing from the destruction, suggesting that the area was an active habitat for wildlife.

Referring to its previous orders in the Ashok Kumar Sharma, IFS (Retd) & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors case, the court emphasised on its March 4 directive that held state Chief Secretaries personally accountable for the failure to constitute statutory committees tasked with identifying forest lands. It also cited its February 3 order in the same case, which prohibited states from reducing forest cover without providing compensatory afforestation land. The court was particularly critical of the Telangana government’s actions, questioning why the deforestation was carried out with such urgency when the statutory process to determine forest land status had not even begun.

Senior Advocate Gaurav Agarwal, representing the State of Telangana, argued before the Supreme Court that the disputed land did not fall under the category of forest. However, the bench remained unconvinced. Justice B.R. Gavai pointedly questioned whether the government had obtained the necessary permissions for tree felling, emphasising that the classification of the land was secondary to the legal requirements for environmental clearances.

“Forest or not, did you secure the requisite approvals before cutting down the trees?” Justice Gavai asked, as per a report in LiveLaw, expressing dismay over the rapid deforestation. “Clearing 100 acres in just two to three days is alarming… We must remind you of a simple principle—no matter how powerful, no one is above the law.”

Meanwhile, Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing on behalf of certain intervenors, informed the bench that students protesting the destruction were being detained, highlighting the Telangana government’s heavy-handed approach in suppressing opposition to the project.

Morning proceedings and initial stay order: In the morning session, the Supreme Court had issued an interim order staying the tree-felling activities in Kancha Gachibowli, acting on an urgent oral mention by Senior Advocate K. Paremeshwar, the amicus curiae in the broader forest conservation case (TN Godavarman matter).

The bench took cognisance of media reports highlighting rapid deforestation over the extended weekend, suggesting that authorities had deliberately accelerated the process to avoid public scrutiny. The reports further indicated that the forest area housed at least eight species of scheduled wildlife. Concerned by these developments, the court ordered an immediate site inspection by the Telangana High Court’s Registrar (Judicial), directing that an interim report be submitted by 3:30 PM on the same day.

The directive was communicated to the Telangana High Court’s Registrar (Judicial) by the Supreme Court’s Registrar (Judicial) to ensure prompt compliance. Additionally, the court instructed the Chief Secretary of Telangana to prevent any further tree felling until further orders were issued.

As per Live Law, the order was dictated as follows:

“News reports indicate extensive deforestation is taking place in the Kancha Gachibowli forest. A vast number of trees are reportedly being felled, and it appears that authorities have taken advantage of the long weekend to expedite the destruction. Reports also suggest that the area is home to multiple scheduled wildlife species. We direct the Registrar (Judicial) of the Telangana High Court to conduct an immediate site visit and submit an interim report by 3:30 PM today. The Registrar (Judicial) of this court is directed to communicate this order forthwith. Furthermore, the Chief Secretary of Telangana shall ensure that no further tree felling is permitted in Kancha Gachibowli until this court issues further directions.”

During the hearing, Senior Advocate Dr. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for the Telangana government, informed the court that the Telangana High Court was also hearing a related matter. In response, the Supreme Court clarified that while it was taking suo-moto cognisance of the issue, it had not placed any restrictions on the proceedings before the High Court.

The Supreme Court’s strong intervention signals its deep concern over environmental degradation and the failure of state authorities to adhere to legal and procedural safeguards before undertaking large-scale deforestation. The matter is expected to be closely monitored in the coming days.

Telangana High Court proceedings on Kancha Gachibowli forest case

Hearing on April 3, 2025: On Thursday, the Telangana High Court extended its interim order directing a status quo concerning the large-scale felling of trees in the Kancha Gachibowli forest area, located near the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) campus. The bench, comprising Acting Chief Justice Sujoy Paul and Justice Renuka Yara, also granted the State government time until April 7, 2025 to submit its counter affidavit in the matter. The court’s intervention followed an earlier directive issued on April 2, wherein it had explicitly restrained the State from taking any coercive steps until further deliberations. During the said hearing, the court was informed that the Supreme Court had also taken cognisance of the matter earlier in the day and had required for a site inspection to take place.

Senior Advocate Dr. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, representing the Telangana government, argued that the Supreme Court’s directive requiring a site inspection should not be misinterpreted as a restriction on the High Court’s jurisdiction to proceed with the case. He contended that the land in question had been subject to litigation for decades, yet no claims or legal documents had ever categorised it as a forest. According to him, the absence of such claims over the last 30 years underscored that the area was never formally recognised as forest land. Singhvi further claimed that several institutions in the vicinity, including a botanical garden and a golf course, demonstrated the region’s long-standing allocation for non-forest purposes. He insisted that the land had been assigned to a private entity nearly 20 years ago, and the State’s actions were in line with established policies.

In response, Senior Advocate S. Niranjan Reddy, appearing for the Vata Foundation, strongly refuted the State’s assertions. He informed the court that despite the Supreme Court’s order staying tree felling, the destruction had continued until Thursday morning. Reddy submitted an interim application (IA) containing newspaper reports and timestamped photographic evidence substantiating his claim. Additionally, he alerted the court to alleged police repression, revealing that a student who had been documenting the tree felling through video recordings was detained at a local police station. Reddy emphasised that the petitioners were now shielded by the Supreme Court’s intervention but urged the High Court to scrutinise the State’s conduct in its upcoming hearing on April 7.

Another counsel representing a student union underscored the alarming pattern of police atrocities against students peacefully protesting the destruction. He further argued that the land in question belonged to the University of Hyderabad, strengthening the case against its allocation for commercial IT development. Acknowledging these submissions, the High Court directed the State’s legal representatives to formally respond to these serious allegations and scheduled the matter for further hearing on April 7.

The High Court’s order summarised the joint submission made by Senior Advocate Singhvi and the Advocate General, wherein they requested that the matter be heard on April 7 to allow the State sufficient time to file a counter affidavit. The court recorded that the petitioners had no objection to this timeline, provided that the interim relief against tree felling remained in place. Senior Advocate Niranjan Reddy reiterated that since the Supreme Court had already imposed a stay, the High Court should simply proceed with the scheduled hearing on April 7. The court accepted these arguments and directed the State to file its response to all interim applications submitted by the petitioners.

Hearing on April 2, 2025: On Wednesday, the Telangana High Court had imposed a temporary stay on the felling of trees in the disputed Kancha Gachibowli land. The matter was heard following an urgent plea against the Telangana government’s issuance of a Government Order (GO) that sought to alienate 400 acres of green cover for the development of IT infrastructure.

The matter arose from a petition filed by the environmental non-profit Vata Foundation, which challenged a contentious government order facilitating the alienation of 400 acres of green land in the region for IT infrastructure development. The petitioners argued that the GO violated the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, and demanded that all government actions undertaken pursuant to the order be annulled. They further urged the court to designate the land as a ‘National Park.’ Additionally, the court heard a similar Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by retired scientist Kalapala Babu Rao, who sought equivalent relief.

Between 28/03/25 to 02/04/25.. just 3 – 4 days… lives of peaceful living beings has been turned upside down.. in its desperation.. while the court believed otherwise.. the Govt deploys dozens of heavy machinery to flatten a beautiful deemed forest land in #KanchaGachibowli..… pic.twitter.com/NR8Bf1Typj

— Vata Foundation (@vata_foundation) April 2, 2025

The Vata Foundation’s plea asserted that the land, which had remained untouched for centuries, was home to 237 bird species, spotted deer, wild boars, star tortoises, snakes, and ancient rock formations and lakes. The petitioners contended that the Telangana State Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (TSIIC), which acquired the land in 2012, issued the GO in 2024 intending to divert the land for commercial purposes. The rapid deforestation prompted the petitioners to approach the High Court, highlighting that the area also encompassed land belonging to the University of Hyderabad, which needed urgent protection.

The court had originally scheduled the matter for April 7 but was forced to intervene earlier after the petitioners reported that 40 JCB machines had been deployed for large-scale tree felling. Following urgent lunch motion requests, the High Court took up the matter on April 2 and imposed a stay.

During the hearing, Senior Advocate L. Ravichander, appearing for the petitioner Kalapala Babu Rao, highlighted the blatant disregard for judicial precedents by the Telangana government. He pointed out that the government’s actions flouted two crucial Supreme Court judgments—T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India and Ashok Kumar Sharma v. Union of India & Others—which mandated the identification and preservation of forests, including areas not officially designated as such but qualifying under the dictionary definition. He further argued that the region’s unique rock formations, estimated to be nearly 2 billion years old, harboured rare flora and exotic bird species that warranted urgent protection.

Conversely, the State’s Advocate General A. Sudharshan Reddy dismissed the petitioners’ case as being based solely on “Google images” rather than official records. He argued that the government held clear revenue records indicating that the land had always been designated for industrial use. Attempting to trivialise the issue, he remarked that if the presence of peacocks, mongooses, and snakes were to determine forest status, then large parts of Hyderabad, including the city’s golf course, should also be declared forests. The High Court, however, refused to accept this line of reasoning and reiterated the need for a thorough examination of the matter.

Union government’s intervention

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change officially intervened in the contentious clearing of 400 acres of forest land in Kancha Gachibowli, Hyderabad, which has been earmarked for auction by the Telangana government. Expressing serious concern over the alleged large-scale deforestation and environmental damage, the ministry has demanded an immediate factual report from the State government regarding the ongoing developments on April 2, 2025.

In a formal communication addressed to the Additional Chief Secretary (Forests) of Telangana on Wednesday, Assistant Inspector General of Forests S. Sundar stated that the ministry had been alerted to reports of “illegal felling and removal of vegetation” in the Kancha Gachibowli area. The Telangana Industrial Infrastructure Corporation Limited (TGIIC), the entity responsible for the land’s auction, was identified as carrying out these activities. The letter noted that widespread news coverage in both print and digital media had highlighted concerns over ecological destruction, particularly regarding harm to the region’s wildlife, water bodies, and distinctive rock formations.

Further amplifying the gravity of the situation, the letter revealed that the Union Minister for Environment, Forest & Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav, had received multiple representations from Members of Parliament and various public representatives, urging immediate action to prevent irreversible environmental damage.

In light of these alarming concerns, the ministry directed the Telangana government to submit a detailed factual report on the matter without delay. Additionally, the State was instructed to initiate legal proceedings as per the relevant statutes, including the Indian Forest Act, the Wildlife Protection Act, and the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, among other applicable laws. The letter also stressed the necessity of ensuring strict adherence to judicial directives issued by courts and tribunals concerning forest conservation and land protection.

Reacting to the Union’s intervention, Union Minister for Coal and Mines G. Kishan Reddy publicly expressed his gratitude to Bhupender Yadav for taking decisive action in the matter. Reddy emphasised that the Union’s response was a crucial step towards ensuring governmental accountability, preventing further environmental degradation, and safeguarding the region’s green cover. He further remarked that the intervention would help ensure that all actions related to the disputed land remain within legal boundaries and undergo the necessary scrutiny through proper consultation processes.

Environmental devastation and rising concerns

Student groups and environmental activists have warned that the destruction of the Kancha Gachibowli Forest will have dire ecological consequences. Researcher Arun Vasireddy, in a report on the area’s environmental significance, highlighted that deforestation in Kancha Gachibowli Forest could lead to a rise in local temperatures by 1 to 4 degrees Celsius, worsening heat conditions in the Gachibowli region. As Hyderabad’s IT corridor continues to expand, activists argue that the loss of such a crucial green space will further degrade air quality, threaten biodiversity, and contribute to climate instability.

Despite mounting protests, the state government has shown little willingness to engage with environmental concerns, opting instead for heavy-handed police action against students and journalists alike.

Congress government’s crackdown on student protest at University of Hyderabad

The University of Hyderabad (UoH) has erupted in protest as students launched an indefinite boycott of classes, condemning the Telangana government’s decision to auction 400 acres of Kancha Gachibowli through the TGIIC for the development of an IT park. The protests gained momentum amid allegations of state overreach, police repression, and environmental destruction.

According to Akash Kumar, vice president of the UoH Students’ Union, students are being forcibly restricted within the campus premises by the police, preventing them from taking their protest to the streets. “The ongoing deforestation by TGIIC is leading to irreversible ecological damage. Kancha Gachibowli is home to diverse flora and fauna, and we demand an immediate halt to these reckless land-clearing activities. We have launched an indefinite strike today and will continue until the deforestation stops,” Kumar stated while conversing with reporters of The Hindustan Times. He further demanded the removal of the heavy police presence and the more than 50 earthmoving machines that have been systematically razing down the land.

Protesting students emphasised that Kancha Gachibowli is not merely an empty piece of land but an ecological hotspot that harbours over 734 plant species, 220 bird species, and vulnerable wildlife, including the Indian Star Tortoise. The land’s unique rock formations and lakes contribute to the biodiversity of the region, and its destruction for an IT park is seen as an act of environmental vandalism.

Despite widespread public outrage, TGIIC has persisted with the clearing activities since Sunday. The Telangana police, on the other hand, attempted to whitewash their role by releasing a statement on Monday denying the use of force. According to their version, students were not subjected to lathi charges but had instead “attacked officials and workers with sticks and stones.” On Monday and Tuesday, the state police detained 55 students in what has been described as a preventive measure, later releasing 53 of them. However, as per Telangana Today, two students—B. Rohit Kumar and Erram Naveen Kumar—were arrested and remanded to judicial custody, having been booked under multiple sections related to criminal trespassing and rioting.

Escalation of State Repression: Police brutality and arbitrary detentions

As protests entered their fourth consecutive day on April 2, 2025, the situation on campus turned increasingly tense. Students and faculty members, led by the University of Hyderabad Teachers’ Association and the Joint Action Committee, intensified their agitation, rallying inside the campus and condemning both the government’s actions and the university administration’s inaction. However, in a move reminiscent of authoritarian crackdowns on student movements, the state responded with force.

On Tuesday, police had resorted to lathi charges as demonstrators attempted to march towards the main gate. Several students sustained injuries as scuffles broke out at the East Campus, further fuelling resentment against the state’s heavy-handed tactics. Videos circulating on social media show police officers beating students and forcibly dragging them away, despite peaceful protest being a fundamental democratic right.

NSUI-HCU General Secretary Prabhakar Singh spoke to the media and lambasted the university administration for what he called “facilitating” police brutality. “The administration has completely failed us. They enabled the police to enter the campus and allowed JCB machines to continue their destruction. They have not even disclosed the details of the executive council meeting held on March 20, which would have clarified their stance on the land issue,” he said.

The demonstrations have united an unusual mix of political and student groups. Left-wing and Dalit-Bahujan student organisations, along with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the BJP’s student wing, are all opposing the auction. Student unions from institutions such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Osmania University have also extended their support. Meanwhile, the Congress’s student wing, the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), has taken a more neutral stance, criticising the university’s failure to protect the land while advocating for discussions on securing its ownership.

A Legacy of Encroachments: The larger struggle for campus land

For many within the university community, this battle is not just about the 400 acres at Kancha Gachibowli but about a continued history of state encroachments on university land. Over the years, multiple projects have chipped away at the university’s territory, including the establishment of the IIIT campus, Gachibowli Stadium, a bus depot, a power station, a school, and even a shooting range. “The state has systematically grabbed land from the university for years. Now, this last remaining stretch, which we consider part of our campus, is also being taken away,” said a protesting student, as per the Hindustan Times.

The faculty and students fear that if this land is lost, the university’s expansion will be severely hampered, undermining its status as an Institution of Eminence. More importantly, they stress that the encroachment of green spaces in favour of commercial ventures sets a dangerous precedent, where corporate interests are prioritised over public welfare and environmental sustainability.

While the Telangana government continues to claim sole ownership of the 400-acre land, its narrative has been met with stiff resistance. The state maintains that a survey conducted on July 19, 2024, in the presence of university officials, confirmed that the University of Hyderabad holds no legal claim to the land. However, the university administration has refuted these claims, stating that no such survey ever took place. The institution insists that it has been repeatedly requesting the state for proper demarcation, only to be ignored.

Regardless of the state’s legal claims, protesting students claim that the issue at hand is not mere ownership but environmental conservation and academic autonomy. The land is an irreplaceable green lung for Hyderabad’s IT corridor and must be preserved rather than handed over to corporate interests.

As the protests persist, students remain resolute in their demands: immediate withdrawal of police forces and bulldozers from the campus vicinity, a written assurance from the university administration that it will fight for the land’s legal registration under its name, and transparency in land-related documents and executive decisions.

Journalist detained amid crackdown on protest coverage

Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) working president K.T. Rama Rao has strongly criticised the Congress-led Telangana government for allegedly detaining a journalist covering the ongoing student protests at the University of Hyderabad. KTR condemned the police action, describing it as an excessive use of state power to silence dissent. He accused the government of suppressing press freedom and stifling critical voices. “The draconian police overreach in Telangana is alarming! Journalists are being detained & dissenting voices arrested. This blatant suppression of free speech & expression is unacceptable. And Rahul Gandhi goes to town preaching about democracy and free speech The double standards is beyond sickening.,” he stated in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The draconian police overreach in Telangana is alarming!

Journalists are being detained & dissenting voices arrested.

This blatant suppression of free speech & expression is unacceptable.

And @RahulGandhi goes to town preaching about democracy and free speech

The double… https://t.co/tRDPyndwc2

— KTR (@KTRBRS) March 30, 2025

The detained journalist, identified as Sumit, was documenting the arrests of students protesting the destruction of greenery on the university campus. He later posted a video on social media showing his detention by the police, sparking outrage among press freedom advocates. BRS spokesperson Krishank also slammed the Congress government, arguing that arresting a journalist for doing their job was an attack on the fundamental role of the media in a democracy.

Political opposition intensifies

Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) working president and former Telangana minister K.T. Rama Rao has called on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to intervene in the ongoing land dispute at the University of Hyderabad. Citing Gandhi’s past opposition to the destruction of Mumbai’s Aarey forest, KTR questioned the Congress’s silence on deforestation in Telangana.

This is brazen green murder by destroying 400 acres of precious lung space in western Hyderabad

You can hear the peacocks crying for help as the bulldozers and JCBs of the Congress Govt rummage

If you don’t speak up now, it’s on you Mr @RahulGandhi #SaveHCUBioDiversity pic.twitter.com/iPxnhSgAdv

— KTR (@KTRBRS) March 31, 2025

Amidst growing tensions, Telangana police on April 1 had detained several BJP leaders, including MLAs Payal Shankar and Dhanpal Suryanarayana Gupta, as they attempted to join student protests at the university. The BJP has escalated the matter at the national level, with Telangana BJP president G. Kishan Reddy, Union Minister Bandi Sanjay, and BJP MPs meeting Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Delhi to seek his intervention.

KTR, in a series of posts on X, accused the Congress-led state government of suppressing student voices, harming the environment, and even displacing wildlife. He alleged that police were preventing BRS leaders, including himself, from visiting the protest site. Drawing a comparison, he recalled how Rahul Gandhi was given full security and access when he visited Hyderabad Central University twice during K. Chandrashekar Rao’s tenure to support justice for Rohith Vemula. “Why this hypocrisy, Rahul Ji? What is your government trying to hide from the world?” KTR asked.

హైడ్రా, మూసీ పేరుతో ప్రజల ఇండ్లు – హెచ్‌సీయూలో పక్షుల గూళ్లు

నోరున్న జనంపైకి బుల్డోజర్ – నోరు లేని మూగజీవాల మీదకు బుల్డోజర్!

మూసీలో, హైడ్రాలో మూటల వేట – ఆఖరికి హెచ్‌సీయూలోనూ కాసుల వేట

పంటలు ఎండుతున్నాయి నీళ్లు లేవంటూ రైతుల గోస – అర్ధరాత్రి బుల్డోజర్ దెబ్బలకు వన్యప్రాణాల… pic.twitter.com/jvTFiO1hB4

— KTR (@KTRBRS) April 1, 2025

There have been no social media posts from senior Congress leaders regarding the issue. Leaders such as Rahul Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh, and Priyanka Gandhi have not made any public statements about the protests, arrests, detentions, or the deforestation.

Telangana government defends land auction and development plans

Despite the mounting opposition, the Telangana government is pushing ahead with its plans. Heavy machinery has been deployed to level the land, removing trees and shrubbery over the past few days. Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy has defended the project, arguing that developing the 400-acre site will spur economic growth, attract investments worth ₹50,000 crore, and generate five lakh jobs. He dismissed opposition leaders as “cunning foxes” attempting to obstruct progress.

On March 31, Telangana’s Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy had asserted that the state holds full legal ownership of the land. “We took possession of this land after winning legal battles in both the high court and the Supreme Court. Not a single inch belongs to Hyderabad Central University. Any attempt to dispute this is contempt of court,” he declared.

Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, an alumnus of the university, clarified that HCU had long assumed the land was under its jurisdiction. He explained that when the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) government allocated 400 acres to a private firm in the past, an alternative 397-acre plot in Gopanpally was provided to the university in exchange.

Accompanied by fellow HCU alumnus and IT Minister Sridhar Babu, Bhatti presented evidence of agreements signed between the university’s former registrar and state revenue officials. Sridhar Babu assured that the auction and development would not harm the ecosystem, including landmarks like Peacock Lake and Mushroom Rock, and that students would continue to have access to these sites.

The ministers also accused opposition parties, particularly the BRS, of spreading misinformation by using old images—such as pictures of a dead deer—to mislead students. TGIIC and Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) officials stated that revenue records confirm the 400-acre plot is not classified as forest land, countering BJP claims that it falls under a protected zone. Officials further revealed that a survey was conducted in July 2024 with the consent of the university registrar, and boundary demarcations were finalised in the presence of university and government officials.

Background: The 400-acre land dispute at Hyderabad University

The 400-acre land parcel at the centre of the controversy is part of the approximately 2,500 acres originally allocated to the University of Hyderabad (Hyderabad Central University) when it was established through an Act of Parliament in 1974. The undivided Andhra Pradesh government had granted this land, which was then a remote area about 20 km from Hyderabad’s city centre. Over the years, with the expansion of Hyderabad’s financial district, the land has become highly valuable, particularly due to the growth of the IT sector and corporate developments.

Located in survey number 25 of Kanche Gachibowli village, Serilingampally mandal, Ranga Reddy district, the land is now surrounded by key institutions, including the university, the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), the Indian School of Business (ISB), and major technology campuses such as Microsoft.

In January 2004, following the successful hosting of the 2003 Afro-Asian Games at the nearby Gachibowli sports complex, the then Chandrababu Naidu-led government allotted these 400 acres to IMG Academies Bharat Private Limited for the development of sports facilities. However, the project never took off, leading to the cancellation of the allotment in November 2006 by Naidu’s successor, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy. The land was subsequently transferred to the state’s youth advancement, tourism, and culture department.

IMG challenged the cancellation in court, resulting in a prolonged legal battle that lasted nearly two decades. When the Revanth Reddy-led government came to power in December 2023, it pursued the case aggressively. In March 2024, the Telangana High Court ruled in favour of the state government. IMG then appealed to the Supreme Court, but the petition was dismissed in May 2024. Following the court’s decision, the Telangana government formally took possession of the land.

In June 2024, the TGIIC submitted a proposal to utilise the 400-acre plot for IT and commercial projects. Subsequently, on July 1, 2024, the revenue department officially transferred the land to TGIIC, paving the way for its auction and development.

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The post Mass Deforestation, Protests, Detentions: Supreme Court halts Telangana’s reckless tree felling at Kancha Gachibowli, questions permissions appeared first on SabrangIndia.

When he breathed his last some time back, homages poured in from far and wide including the state and the national government. However when I visited his wife Vimla Bahuguna and daughter Madhu Pathak soon after this, they emphasized that what is most important is to honor his ideas and vision. Since then they have continued to work for this cause and their most recent effort is in the form of the book being discussed here. Titled ‘Paharon ki Peera’ (The Agony of the Mountains) this Hindi book containing 43 essays, memoirs and articles of Sunderlal Ji reminds us of the unique writing skills and style rooted in his unending travels ( including very long foot marches all over the vast Himalayan region) and struggles. In her introduction Madhu Pathak has acknowledged the help and encouragement she received from her mother Vimla and from her husband Dr.Bhuvan Chandra Pathak. Kumar Prashant has written an engaging foreword.

This book has Sundrlal Bahuguna’s writing on environment and forests, several pages of his diary, his recollections of various struggles, biographical sketches of great inspirational persons with whom he worked ( including Sridev Suman, Sarla Behan and Mira Behan, as well his observations on various issues of interest and importance. Parts of the book bring back vivid memories of the numerous campaigns and struggles with which he was associated.

The veteran environmentalist and Chipko ( hug the trees movement) activist was also a freedom fighter and regarded Mahatma Gandhi as his most prominent teacher and mentor. He devoted his life to applying principles of non-violent struggles in the context of increasingly important tasks of protecting forests and rivers.

Along with his wife Vimla ( who was more formally trained in Gandhian principles and methods by Sarla Behan, the famous European disciple of Gandhi) , several deeply committed Gandhian activists and villagers of Garhwal region of  Western Himalayas he was involved in many struggles to protect trees marked for felling and to prevent the construction of gigantic dams widely exposed for their serious risks and hazards by senior scientists and experts.

Born in a village along the bank of the Ganges river in Tehri Garhwal , as a schoolboy he met Sridev Suman , a famous freedom fighter who later sacrificed his life during a jail sentence, and decided to follow his example of a deeply committed social life.

After independence Sunderlal and Vimla settled in the remote village of Silyara to serve the villagers of surrounding areas, leading an austere life.

Following the Chinese invasion leading Gandhian  Vinoba Bhave called upon  Gandhian social workers in the Himalayan region to play a wider social role and so now  Sunderlal started travelling more widely  in many parts of Uttarakhand, particularly the Garhwal part. This led to increasing involvement with social and environmental concerns.

Both Sunderlal and Vimla were involved in anti-liquor movements and rights assertion movements of weakest sections which challenged various forms of discriminatory practices. Enduring relationships were established with several younger activists like those in Henvalghati region.

Around the late seventies a series of Chipko movement activities centered in Henvalghati region were launched for saving forests like those of Advani and Salet which generated a lot of enthusiasm. The action shifted then to even more remote forests like those of  Badiyargad, where Sunderlal Bahuguna went on a long fast in a dense forest area in very  difficult conditions and Vimla also followed him there. During a visit to this region to report on this movement, I learnt that Madhu, brave daughter of brave parents, had also plunged into a forest closer to Silyara Ashram to protect the trees being felled there.

Side by side Sunderlal maintained a dialogue with senior persons in the government. The then prime minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi in particular had very high respect for him. Very big success was achieved as the government agreed to stop the green felling of trees in a vast Himalayan area.

Following this success Sunderlal went on a very long and difficult march from Kashmir to Kohima, including Bhutan and Nepal, covering a vast part of the Himalayan region to spread the message of saving forests and environment with the involvement of people. During this march, taken up in several stages, several times he faced threat to life but did not stop and completed the march. This march helped him greatly to known the conditions of people and environment in the Himalayan region to a much wider extent.

He emphasized protection of sustainable livelihoods along with protection of environment. He was involved closely in resisting displacement and organizing forest workers. He was also involved in several constructive activities relating to regeneration of degraded forests.

Soon he was in the thick of the movement for opposing the harmful social and environmental aspects of dam projects in Himalayan region particularly the gigantic and highly controversial Tehri dam project, which was described as a project of unacceptably high hazards even by officially constituted committees. This proved to be a very long and difficult struggle. Sunderlal Bahuguna left his ashram in Silyara and camped on the bank of the Ganges river for a very long time, accompanied by Vimla.

Although this long struggle did not succeed in stopping the high-risk dam, it certainly helped to spread awareness of these important issues far and wide.

Sunderlal Bahuguna became an inspiration source for forest protection and environmental struggles in many parts of India and even abroad. In the Western Ghats region, for instance, he was an important inspiration source for the great Appiko movement for saving forests. He visited the region and this proved to be an important turning point in the mobilization for the movement.

He was honored with several prestigious awards, including the Padma Vibhushan.

He contributed to many constructive causes such as the Bhoodan (gift of land) movement for making available some farmland to landless rural households.

He played a very important role in evolving an alternative development strategy for the Himalayan region rooted in a combination of combining environment protection with sustainable livelihoods.

Some more information on the book (in Hindi)—Paharo ki Peera by Sunderlal Bahuguna ( Selected writings compiled and edited by Madhu Pathak), 266 pages, Price INR 350, Paperback, Published by Samay Sakshay, 15 Faltu Line , Dehradun—248001, India.

The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Vimla and Sunderlal Bahuguna—Chipko Movement and the Struggle Against Tehri Dam Project, Man over Machine-A Path to Peace, Planet in Peril and A Day in 2071.

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