M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India: a right against climate change

The facts in brief

The petition was filed by the conservationist M.K. Ranjitsinh and others seeking protection of the Great Indian Bustard (GIB) and the Lesser Florican — critically endangered birds whose populations had collapsed, the GIB to roughly 150 individuals. A principal cause is collision: the birds, which lack frontal vision and fly at power-line height, strike overhead transmission lines crossing their grassland habitat in Rajasthan and Gujarat, often fatally.

In April 2021 the Court had broadly directed that power lines across priority and potential GIB habitat be laid underground. Power producers, transmission utilities and the Union returned to the Court contending that undergrounding high-voltage lines over such vast areas was technically infeasible and economically prohibitive, and that it would cripple the very solar and wind projects central to India's decarbonisation and its international climate commitments.

The Court was thus confronted with a genuine conflict between two environmental imperatives — saving a critically endangered species versus scaling renewable energy to combat climate change. Rajasthan, in particular, is both the last redoubt of the Great Indian Bustard and one of the country's most solar-rich regions, so the geography of conservation and the geography of decarbonisation overlapped almost exactly. Against that backdrop, a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Chandrachud, with Pardiwala and Misra JJ, delivered judgment on 21 March 2024 (the reasoned judgment was uploaded the following month).

The constitutional question

Two questions ran through the case. First, does Indian constitutional law recognise a right against the adverse effects of climate change, given that India has no overarching climate-change statute? Second, on the facts, how should the Court reconcile its 2021 habitat-protection directions with the demonstrated infeasibility of blanket undergrounding and the competing imperative of renewable-energy expansion?

What the Court held

A right against the adverse effects of climate change

The Court recognised a distinct fundamental right "to be free from the adverse effects of climate change." It located the right in Article 21 (life and personal liberty) read with Article 14 (equality), and drew constitutional support from Article 48A and Article 51A(g). The reasoning was that climate harms — heat, drought, flooding, displacement, and food and water insecurity — fall unequally on the poor and the vulnerable, engaging both the right to life and the guarantee of equality.

The Court framed climate harm not merely as a question of life and health under Article 21, but as an equality question under Article 14, because the burden of a warming planet is distributed so unevenly across society. Those with the fewest resources to adapt — to relocate from flood plains, to insulate against extreme heat, to absorb the shock of crop failure — bear the heaviest costs of a phenomenon they have done least to cause. That uneven distribution, the Court reasoned, is itself an inequality the Constitution recognises.

The absence of a dedicated statute, far from defeating the right, made its judicial articulation necessary: the right is implicit in the constitutional guarantees and does not await legislation to come into being. The Court drew the threads together from its own environmental jurisprudence — the precautionary principle, the public-trust doctrine, and the long line of cases treating a healthy environment as an incident of the right to life — and gave them a name and a constitutional address. India has assumed substantial international climate commitments through the UNFCCC framework, the Paris Agreement and its domestic pledges; the Court read those commitments as confirming, rather than creating, a right that the Constitution already secures to every person.

Recalibrating the Great Indian Bustard directions

On the operative dispute, the Court modified its order of 19 April 2021, which had imposed a near-blanket direction to lay all high- and low-voltage power lines underground across a vast GIB-habitat area. Recognising that an inflexible undergrounding mandate could itself impede India's solar-power expansion and climate goals — and that undergrounding high-voltage lines was often technically and economically unfeasible — the Court replaced the blanket direction with a calibrated framework.

It constituted an expert committee — drawing on conservation science, power-transmission engineering and the relevant ministries — to determine the scope, feasibility and extent of undergrounding and other GIB-protection measures, and to identify the priority and potential habitat in which restrictions should operate. The committee was tasked with weighing technical feasibility, cost, and the conservation imperative case by case, rather than applying a single blanket rule across the whole of the bird's range. The judgment thus pairs a landmark rights-recognition with a pragmatic, committee-mediated balancing of two environmental goods, replacing a rigid judicial mandate with a structure capable of accommodating engineering and ecological evidence as it accumulates.

The recalibration is notable for what it does not do: it does not abandon the conservation objective, nor does it subordinate the bird to the grid. It instead recognises that a continuing-mandamus order issued on incomplete information may, once tested against feasibility evidence, need adjustment — and that the proper response is to build an evidence-gathering mechanism into the order rather than to choose one environmental value over the other in the abstract.

The doctrinal architecture

M.K. Ranjitsinh makes three doctrinal contributions. It supplies, for the first time, an explicit constitutional right against the adverse effects of climate change, rooted in Articles 21 and 14 and supported by Articles 48A and 51A(g). It reframes climate harm as an equality issue, recognising the disproportionate burden borne by the poor and marginalised. And it models a method for environment-versus-environment adjudication: where two ecological imperatives genuinely conflict, the Court favours an expert-committee balancing over a blanket judicial command, exhibiting a measure of judicial humility and course-correction in continuing-mandamus environmental litigation.

The decision situates India alongside jurisdictions that recognise constitutional climate rights and gives litigants a fundamental-rights peg for challenging climate-harmful state action or inaction.

There is, however, an unresolved tension at the heart of the judgment that commentators were quick to identify. The same decision that announced a fundamental right against the adverse effects of climate change also eased the very habitat restrictions that conservationists had secured, in order to clear the path for the solar infrastructure that the climate right is invoked to justify. Saving the Great Indian Bustard and scaling renewable energy are both ends the Constitution can be read to favour, yet on the ground they pull in opposite directions across the grasslands of Rajasthan. The Court's resolution — to recognise the right in ringing terms while remitting the hard trade-off to an expert committee — leaves the doctrinal force of the new right somewhat detached from the operative outcome of the case. Whether the right against climate change will, in future litigation, function as a genuine constraint on state action or principally as an interpretive lodestar remains to be worked out as the doctrine is tested against concrete facts.

Trajectory

The climate-change-right holding is already the lodestar of Indian climate litigation, cited as the doctrinal anchor for claims grounded in environmental and climate harm. The expert-committee mechanism has driven the subsequent GIB-conservation proceedings: in later orders the Court has accepted calibrated measures — undergrounding where feasible, bird-diverters on lines, and restrictions on new lines and turbines in core habitat — illustrating the framework in operation.

Commentators have noted the tension between the rhetorical force of the new right and the decision's simultaneous easing of restrictions on energy infrastructure through critical habitat. That tension notwithstanding, the decision now governs the intersection of biodiversity protection, renewable-energy policy and constitutional climate rights, and will shape environmental adjudication for the foreseeable future.

Related on Valkya

• Vanashakti v. Union of India and the review on post-facto clearances
• K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India: the nine-judge privacy declaration
• In Re Article 370: the constitutional integration of Jammu and Kashmir

Sources

1. LiveLaw — "For First Time, Supreme Court Recognizes Right To Be Free From Adverse Effects Of Climate Change": https://www.livelaw.in/
2. Bar & Bench — "People have fundamental right to be free from impact of climate change: Supreme Court": https://www.barandbench.com/
3. Bar & Bench — "Underground power lines, ban on new wind turbines: Supreme Court accepts measures to protect Great Indian Bustard": https://www.barandbench.com/
4. Supreme Court Observer — "Supreme Court Review 2024: Speaking green, acting grey on key environmental issues": https://www.scobserver.in/
5. Verdictum — "MK Ranjitsinh vs. Union of India: Right To Be Free From Adverse Effects Of Climate Change": https://www.verdictum.in/