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.
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.