Environmental Law & the NGT — 32 Valkya Editorial digests
Environmental jurisprudence — the precautionary and polluter-pays principles, sustainable development, environmental clearance and the bar on ex post facto approvals, and the National Green Tribunal's balancing of development against ecology.
The Supreme Court held that a retrospective environmental clearance is alien to environmental jurisprudence and an anathema to the EIA Notification, 1994, striking down a 2002 circular that permitted post-facto clearances. Balancing equities, it declined to order closure but upheld a restitutionary penalty of Rs 10 crore on each erring unit.
The National Green Tribunal disposed of a challenge to the Asharam Tiraha–Ratnagiri Tiraha (Ayodhya Bypass) six-laning in Bhopal, permitting felling of 7,871 trees — reduced from 9,888 after design changes — subject to compensatory afforestation at 10:1, native-species-only planting, 15-year monitoring by a technical committee, and air-quality monitoring. The order is a textbook application of the development-versus-environment balance.
The Kerala High Court held that a 'hostile work environment' divorced from any sexual conduct or advance is not sexual harassment under the POSH Act, and that proceedings need a written complaint under Section 9. A purely service or labour grievance falls outside the Act.
The ITAT Delhi held that where the CBDT has accepted a royalty and technical-fee rate of 1.9% of net sales under the assessee's Unilateral Advance Pricing Agreement, the Transfer Pricing Officer's higher adjustment is excessive and must be capped at the APA-accepted rate. A digest of the facts, the arm's-length question, and why a concluded APA carries persuasive weight.
Taking suo motu cognizance of an elephant's death by electrocution, a Karnataka High Court Division Bench held that wildlife conservation is a constitutional mandate flowing from Articles 21, 48A and 51A(g). A digest of the suo motu jurisdiction, the constitutional reasoning, and the slate of preventive and accountability directions the Court issued.
A Division Bench of the Kerala High Court held that no construction — not even a public crematorium — may be raised on land classified CRZ-I(A), the most ecologically protected coastal category. A digest of the dense-mangrove facts, the rejection of retrospective 'rectification' of the CRZ category, and what the ecology-first standard means for coastal development.
In December 2025 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court dismissed the Revenue's transfer-pricing appeal, faulting the Dispute Resolution Panel for merely endorsing the Transfer Pricing Officer's conclusions without recording its own findings. A digest of the facts, the statutory duty of the DRP under Section 144C, and why the Court found no substantial question of law.
In 2014 a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court banned Jallikattu and bullock-cart races as cruelty under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, read the Five Freedoms into the statute, and gave the welfare of animals a constitutional vocabulary. A digest of the holding, the Five Freedoms standard, and how a 2023 Constitution Bench later distinguished the decision.
In 1999, the Supreme Court adopted the precautionary principle, shifted the burden of proof onto the developer under scientific uncertainty, and made the case for specialised environmental courts.
The Delhi High Court upholds an arbitral award making DMRC reimburse a contractor's Environmental Compensation Charges, holding ECC is not a tax, duty or levy.
Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta framed environmental protection as a continuing constitutional duty and ordered three States to curb Chambal sand mining.
On 29 April 1969, a five-judge bench held that the rule against bias vitiated a forest-service selection and collapsed the rigid distinction between administrative and quasi-judicial action — the foundation of modern Indian natural-justice doctrine.
The Supreme Court imported the 'proper purpose' rule into Indian company law, holding that an allotment engineered to reduce a majority shareholder to a minority is an invalid exercise of fiduciary power and an act of oppression.
On 19 April 2024, a two-judge bench restated the narrow scope of the Order XLVII review jurisdiction, protected reserved forest land against a private title claim, and imposed ₹5 lakh costs recoverable from the officers who filed collusive affidavits.
On 1 March 2025, a Full Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court annulled the 2015 notification exempting 62 forest species from the Transit Rules as ultra vires the Indian Forest Act and violative of Articles 14, 21 and 48-A.
Valkya Editorial··7 min
TribunalNational Green Tribunal (Principal Bench, New Delhi)
On 22 April 2026, the NGT Principal Bench held that the EIA Notification 2006 does not contemplate any 'deemed approval' of an Environmental Clearance, and directed the Tree Officer, MoEF&CC and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee to act within eight weeks against a 61-acre Dwarka project that had felled approximately 2,000 trees without clearance.
Bombay HC holds that setting aside an award under Sections 34/37 restores parties to the pre-award position, leaving the disputes free to be re-arbitrated.
The May 2026 cycle in Indian environmental law has produced an operationally consequential cluster — the Supreme Court's Chambal Gharial Sanctuary sand-mining directions on 26 May 2026, the NGT Principal Bench's Sultanpuri illegal tree-felling order, the Jaipur textile CETP operationalisation, the Sijimali bauxite project notice to Vedanta and MoEFCC, the Malbazar hospital bio-medical waste direction, the Waste-to-Energy CPCB compliance report, the pre-monsoon ESZ enforcement pattern, the CAQM 50 mg/Nm³ PM emission standard for Delhi-NCR, the Environmental (Protection) Fund Rules 2026, and the continuing T.N. Godavarman engagement on deemed-forest doctrine. A practitioner's read on the cycle.
On 21 April 2014 a three-judge bench of Justices A.K. Patnaik, Surinder Singh Nijjar and Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla — with Patnaik J. pronouncing judgment — held that every iron-ore and manganese-ore mining lease in Goa had, in its renewed avatar, expired on 22 November 2007; that every mining operation thereafter was illegal; that the State's 'second renewal' orders had no statutory basis; and, drawing on the Justice M.B. Shah Commission Report, translated inter-generational equity into a financial mechanism by capping iron-ore excavation at 20 million MT a year, mandating e-auction of inventorised ores, and constituting the Goan Iron Ore Permanent Fund under Court supervision.
On 29 March 2019 a two-judge bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta suspended — not outright quashed — the 28 October 2015 environmental clearance for the Mopa greenfield airport in Goa, and remitted the matter to the Expert Appraisal Committee for re-examination within a month, on a record that disclosed non-disclosure in Form-1 of ecologically sensitive markers, an inadequate cumulative-impact assessment, and faunal markers including the South Asian river dolphin that the EAC's recommendation had not engaged. A practitioner's read on the duty of candour, the EIA rigour standard, and the suspension-for-re-examination remedial template.
On 13 February 1996 — six months before *Vellore* — a Division Bench of the Supreme Court led by Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy applied the absolute-liability doctrine of *Oleum Gas Leak* to five chemical units at Bichhri village in Rajasthan and operationalised the polluter-pays principle as a remediation-cost obligation. The judgment is doctrinally the antecedent to *Vellore* on polluter-pays, the first explicit reception of customary international environmental law into Indian law, and — in its 2011 execution arc — confirmed recovery of ₹37.385 crore plus interest from the polluters.
On 6 July 2011, a three-judge Bench of Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia, Justice Aftab Alam and Justice K.S. Panicker Radhakrishnan — within the T.N. Godavarman writ — dismissed the Shella Action Committee's challenge and upheld the revised environmental clearance, site clearance and Stage-I forest clearance granted to Lafarge for its limestone mine at Nongtrai, East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya. Part II of the judgment used the occasion to issue forward-looking guidelines under section 3(3) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 — directing the appointment of a National Regulator, the expansion of Regional Offices, the constitution of Regional Empowered Committees, GIS-based decision-support databases, the sequencing of forest clearance before environmental clearance, and mandatory public hearing. A digest of the doctrinal architecture, the doctrine of proportionality, the anti-'fait accompli' principle, and the implementation record fifteen years on.
On 13 December 1996, taking suo motu cognisance of a press report on a Himachal motel that had encroached on protected forest land and diverted the Beas, a Division Bench of the Supreme Court formally received the Public Trust Doctrine into Indian law — quashing the prior approvals and lease, ordering restitution at the motel's cost and issuing show-cause on exemplary damages. A digest of the doctrine, why the Court read it into Articles 21 and 48A, and how it has since travelled from rivers and forests to spectrum and coal.
On 30 December 1996 — the penultimate working day before his retirement — Justice Kuldip Singh, sitting with Justice Faizan Uddin, delivered the Taj Trapezium judgment: 292 enumerated industries within a 10,400 square kilometre polygon around the Taj Mahal were directed to switch to natural gas or relocate outside the Zone, with labour-protective relief for workers in relocated units. A digest of how the Bench operationalised the *Vellore* principles, why it created a monument-centric zoning template, and how the continuing-mandamus device powered later orders from CNG-Delhi to subsequent TTZ rulings.
On 21 March 2024, a three-judge bench recognised for the first time a right against the adverse effects of climate change, recalibrating Great Indian Bustard habitat protection.
On 18 October 2000, a three-judge Bench of Chief Justice Dr A.S. Anand, Justice S.P. Bharucha and Justice B.N. Kirpal — by a 2:1 majority — allowed the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to continue, subject to the condition that the dam height be raised in 5-metre slabs only after the Relief and Rehabilitation Sub-Group of the Narmada Control Authority certified that R&R for displaced families had been carried out pari passu with construction. The majority articulated a doctrine of narrow judicial review in major-project PILs, held the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award binding, and treated sustainable development as a balancing exercise. Justice Bharucha dissented. A digest of the holding, the bench's reasoning, the dissent treated as the moral compass of environmental PILs, and the subsequent doctrinal arc.
On 9 January 1991, a Division Bench of the Supreme Court — Justices K.N. Singh and N.D. Ojha — articulated the right to enjoyment of pollution-free water and air as part of the right to life under Article 21, and held that PIL standing in environmental matters does not require a personal-injury showing. On the facts the petition was dismissed as not bona fide and ₹5,000 costs imposed, but the legal principles — though technically obiter — have been treated as authoritative in every subsequent environmental Article 21 case.
On 12 December 1996, a two-judge Bench of Justice J.S. Verma and Justice B.N. Kirpal in W.P.(C) 202/1995 held that the word 'forest' in the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 must be understood according to its dictionary meaning, irrespective of ownership or classification. The order constituted State Expert Committees, imposed felling moratoriums in the Northeast, J&K and other hill regions, protected workers in closed saw mills, and — through the formula 'this order is to continue, until further orders' — inaugurated what has become the longest-running environmental public interest litigation in Indian history. A digest of the foundational order, the 'deemed forest' doctrine, the subsequent architecture (CEC came in 2002, not 1996), and the doctrine's continuing engagement through 2026.
On 16 May 2025, a Supreme Court bench of Justices A.S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan struck down the 2017 Notification and the 2021 Office Memorandum that had enabled ex post facto environmental clearances, holding that retrospective approval was foreign to the architecture of Indian environmental regulation. On 18 November 2025, a different bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai — sitting with Justice K. Vinod Chandran and Justice Bhuyan — recalled that judgment by 2:1, with Bhuyan J. now in dissent. A digest of both judgments, the doctrinal disagreement, and what the environmental-clearance architecture now looks like.
The National Green Tribunal's 2026 dispositions have engaged a recurring pattern of environmental concerns — urban waterbody protection, infrastructure encroachment on protected ecosystems, groundwater management, and the institutional architecture for compliance with environmental clearances. A practitioner's read on the year's substantive direction, with attention to the Omaxe City pond rejuvenation directive (Lucknow), the Delhi Ridge architecture, and the NHAI / Delhi waterbody intervention.
On 28 August 1996, a three-judge Bench led by Justice Kuldip Singh held that 'sustainable development', the 'precautionary principle' and the 'polluter pays' principle are part of the law of the land — and ordered the discharge of pollution fees by tanneries in Tamil Nadu that had contaminated the River Palar and rendered 35,000 hectares of agricultural land unfit for cultivation. The judgment, together with *M.C. Mehta (Oleum Gas Leak)*, supplies the foundational architecture of Indian environmental law. A digest of the doctrines, the directions, and what they require.
Less than a year after the Bhopal disaster, an oleum gas leak from a Shriram unit in Delhi prompted the Supreme Court — through a Constitution Bench led by Bhagwati CJ — to depart from the English strict-liability framework of Rylands v. Fletcher and to formulate a doctrine of absolute liability for enterprises engaged in hazardous activities. The judgment is the doctrinal foundation of Indian environmental and industrial liability law. A digest of the rule, why the Court declined to apply Rylands, and how the doctrine continues to operate four decades on.