Environmental Rights In India: A Critical Appraisal
- IJLLR Journal
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
Adv. Premnath Singh, LL.M., Amity Law School, Amity University
Dr. Aishwarya Pandey, Assistant Professor, Amity Law School, Amity University
ABSTRACT
Protection of the environment has become one of the most vital domains of human rights talk in recent legal and policy debates. In India, the courts have been at the forefront in shaping and mapping the boundaries of environmental rights, particularly through judicial activism. This paper critically examines the phenomenon of judicial activism in environmental protection, and specifically how the higher judiciary has interpreted and stretched the ambit of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution — the right to life — to cover the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
The lack of a specific constitutional provision acknowledging the right to environment has not prevented the judiciary from taking it upon itself to fill the legislative and executive gap. By a series of path-breaking judgments from the early 1980s, including Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of UP, M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, and Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, the Supreme Court and other High Courts have increasingly been interpreting the right to life as including environmental rights. In the process, the judiciary has not only referred to domestic constitutional provisions but has also borrowed international environmental norms and treaties despite not being directly legislated into domestic law.
This paper discusses how the judiciary has used principles like the "Polluter Pays Principle," "Precautionary Principle," "Sustainable Development," and "Intergenerational Equity" to construct a solid environmental jurisprudence. The development of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) as a judicial tool has further enabled citizens, civil society groups, and activists to directly approach the courts on issues relating to environmental degradation. The readiness of the judiciary to accept letters and newspaper reports as writ petitions is an indicator of its proactive approach in providing environmental justice.
Nevertheless, this expansion of the judiciary has not escaped critique. Its detractors state that though judicial activism has delivered dramatic gains to the environment, it has at the same time resulted in alarms concerning overreaching by judges, the absence of technical skill, and encroachment upon the sphere of executives and lawmakers. Moreover, compliance with court directions is an ever-recurring issue due to institutional limitation, administrative ineffectiveness, and political reluctance.
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