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 III 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.
Related:
Cracks in Environmental Jurisprudence: A study of central India’s High Courts
Unending Adjudication: The Vanashakti reversal and environmental finality in India