El Nino, a climatic phenomenon that is generally associated with extreme weather events contrary to the normal, is upon us. Not just any El Nino but the strongest one in the last 144 years according to many data models and analyses. Last time India saw a small seasonal change of hot temperature across the northern part of India, wheat harvesting saw such a detrimental impact that India had to put restrictions on export of wheat. Heat waves in India are projected to rise by 400% by the end of this century (quarter has already gone by) while three of the five warmest years India has ever seen have been recorded in between 2015-2024 (Global Heat Health Information Network and here). A study in 2025 found that the government data on heat wave deaths is haphazard and that an estimated 3,400 deaths could occur every day of a heat wave, distributed across rural and urban areas of the country.
What is the point of all this doom’s day writing? Well, the point is to show that the country (its 1.5 billion People) is facing a huge crisis for which we are very, very scantly prepared. The usual suspects, the executive and the legislature, have been reliable in being of little use when it comes to climate governance and resilience. The country saw sermons on climate change, Ganga rejuvenation, crores of rupees spent and yet, we do not have an action plan. We see governments, across the country, both state and centre, engaging in deforestation programmes, despite massive public ire. During these troublesome times, an institution that the people have put faith in, repeatedly, is judiciary. Whether that be interim orders in the KBR Park, Hyderabad case or the staying of the notification by the Rajasthan Government, which de-notified 732 hectares of the National Chambal Gharial Sanctuary, the higher judiciary retains its position as an institution of public trust.
Responding to the critical issue of accelerating climate change, made worse by a pattern and mode of ‘development’, we have analysed it in three parts, how various high courts across the country have come to deal with cases related to environmental degradation. In doing so, we have also highlighted the cracks in an otherwise robust environmental jurisprudence and in what specific areas these cracks have appeared.
Part I (Covering the courts of Central India), Part II (covering the Bombay High Court) and Part III (covering Himalayan High Courts) would be incomplete without a concluding piece that, in a sense, draws out of this collective analyses of the High Courts’ jurisprudence. Additionally, it is also important to understand the jurisprudence of the High Courts of some of the important states such as Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Delhi, as the national capital and because of its cyclical tryst with pollution problems, has become an important place to study. Uttar Pradesh, housing more than 20 Crore people with Ganga and Yamuna flowing through it, is crucial to examine. Rajasthan due to its delicate environmental balance and –uniquely having a desert—also becomes important.
This is Part IV of the series.
Section One of the Conclusion talks about cases across Delhi, Allahabad and Rajasthan High Court’s and whether a close examination of those cases show any cracks in environment jurisprudence.
Section Two takes its space to analyse and conclude all the four parts.
Section One
The Delhi High Court: Activism and Its Retreat
Of the three courts, Delhi’s record is the most paradoxical—because its environmental ambition has been the highest, and its retreats therefore the more consequential.
The Court’s institutional memory stretches back to Maneka Gandhi v. Union Territory of Delhi (1984), when it ordered the closure of slaughterhouses operating without licences and directed the removal of carcasses polluting the city’s water bodies. The Court followed this with Free Legal Aid Cell (Shri Sugan Chand) v. Government of NCT of Delhi (2001), perhaps the most comprehensive judicial engagement with noise pollution anywhere in India. Justice Arijit Pasayat, in his judgement, surveyed the medical literature—arterial constriction, elevated cholesterol, neurological disorders in children, birth defects near airports—cited Tulsidas on the abortive effects of sound– and directed every District Magistrate and Sub-Divisional Magistrate in Delhi to issue prohibitory orders under Section 144 Cr.P.C. against loudspeaker use and firecrackers. He declared non-compliance by officers as misconduct warranting disciplinary action.
The same Court, in All India Plastic Industries Association v. Government of NCT of Delhi (2009), upheld a notification banning plastic bags in main markets and shopping centres despite a challenge by 1,500 manufacturers. Justice Madan B. Lokur found the plastic industry’s claim of natural justice violation unpersuasive—the industry had already been heard extensively before the Chopra Committee and in the preceding PIL. More significantly, the Court held that the “spirit and sum and substance of Rule 4” of the Environment (Protection) Rules had been followed, even if the literal procedure had not.
These decisions share a common thread i.e., they treat environmental compliance as non-negotiable, procedural objections as secondary, and the larger public interest as inclusive of ecological integrity.
Yet the same Court has authored some of the most consequential environmental retreats on the record.
In Aman Lekhi & Ors. v. Union of India (2021), challenging the Kidwai Nagar redevelopment on grounds of traffic chaos, air pollution, and mass tree-felling, the Court invoked separation of powers to wash its hands clean. It held that courts cannot look into the “quality of material” or the “sufficiency of such material” relied upon by the government; these are matters of subjective executive satisfaction, not judicial review.
The same logic played out in M/S Netgear Technologies v. Assistant Commissioner (2022), where the Court refused to scrutinise the appointment of non-official members to the Expert Appraisal Committee for thermal power and coal-mining projects, stating it “cannot sit in judgment over the wisdom of the Government.” The effect? Expert committees are effectively insulated from public and judicial scrutiny.
In Dr. Kaushal Kant Mishra v. Union of India (2020), involving the Nauroji Nagar redevelopment and the felling of thousands of trees, the Court dismissed the challenge because respective departments had issued NOCs. The logic was that if the paperwork exists, the concerns must have been addressed. It creates a legal environment where procedural compliance nullifies substantive ecological objections.
In a 2023 set of judgments involving Caddie Hotels, SEIAA had filed criminal complaints against builders for commencing excavation and construction without specific Environmental Clearances. The Delhi High Court quashed them all. The builders, it said, had “no mala fide intention”; they operated under a “genuine and bona fide belief” that a blanket clearance granted to the master developer covered them. Penalising them for digging while permission was still pending was, in the Court’s words, a “hyper-technical view.” This is a direct fracture in the strict liability regime that environmental law was built on. In both Aman Lekhi and Dr. Kaushal Kant Mishra, the Court justified non-interference by citing acute housing shortages, dilapidated old buildings, and the need to optimize land use in a metropolis. Acknowledging that Delhi is losing its charm to pollution and population pressure, it still asked: is this enough to stop all development? The answer, it declared, has to be a “no.”
It can therefore be seen that a jurisprudence designed to act as an active sentinel for the environment is being recast as a passive bystander, and the cracks are showing.
The Allahabad High Court: Selective Lapses
The Allahabad High Court’s environmental jurisprudence has attracted less national attention than Delhi’s, but its contributions have been no less significant. In Ajay Tiwari v. State of U.P. (2013), the Court confronted a mining lease holder who argued, correctly as a matter of textual reading, that the Supreme Court’s Deepak Kumar directive requiring environmental clearance for mineral leases below 5 hectares applied only to minor minerals, not to the major minerals (Diaspore and Pyrophyllite) he sought to mine. The Court could have disposed of the matter in a paragraph. Instead, it engaged with the “spirit of the order and the concern which has been expressed” by the Supreme Court. It quoted Hind Stone on inter-generational responsibility for natural resources, cited Article 51A (g) on the fundamental duty to protect the environment, and held that excluding major minerals from environmental clearance would be “against the spirit of the judgment and the object which is sought to be achieved.” The State Government’s direction requiring clearance was “a step taken towards a right direction which needs no interference.” The court executed a purposive interpretation in service of environmental protection.
In B. Agarwal Stone Product Ltd. v. State of U.P. (2007), the Court confronted a constitutional challenge by Hindalco Industries and other mining majors to the Zila Panchayat’s bye-laws levying modest fees on trucks and tractors transporting minerals from mining areas. The petitioners invoked India Cement, Orissa Cement, and the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act to argue that the Central legislation had occupied the entire field of mineral regulation, disabling local governments from any fiscal imposition. A full bench of the Allahabad High Court disagreed. Following the Supreme Court’s then-recent Kesoram decision, the Court held that the fee was levied on the vehicle using the road, not on the mineral itself. It validated the local government’s power to generate revenue for road maintenance and area development, finding constitutional support in Entries 5 (Local Government), 49 (Taxes on lands), and 66 (Fees) of the State List. The significance is easily understated but the Court empowered the weakest tier of government to impose a fiscal cost on the strongest industrial interests, aligning the economic incentives of resource extraction with the fiscal capacity for environmental governance.
In M/S Ansal Properties & Infrastructure v. State of U.P. (2011), the Allahabad High Court firmly applied the principles of restitution and the “polluter pays” doctrine against private real estate developers who attempted to stall the construction of a much-needed municipal Solid Waste Management Plant (SWMP). The developers had illegally included the land earmarked for the municipal dumping yard into their own residential township plans and engaged in frivolous, repeated litigation that delayed the critical environmental infrastructure project for over five years.
Refusing to let private commercial interests override ecological necessity, the Court dismissed their challenges and upheld the government’s decision to reserve the land for the dumping yard. Going a step further to neutralise the developers’ unfair advantage, the Court directed the developers to pay lakhs of rupees to the municipal corporation to compensate for the escalated costs of the delayed project. The Court made it clear that public health and environmental governance would not be allowed to suffer at the hands of corporate manoeuvring and legal delays. And like all good days, the ones at Allahabad High Court, for environment, have begun to fade away.
In Suez India Pvt. Ltd. v. Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (2025), the Court quashed environmental compensation orders against polluting industries, ruling that the UPPCB had no adjudicatory power to impose damages—only the NGT does. The states own environmental regulator was told to file applications and wait. The immediate deterrent was gone. The court did not consider the arguments of the board which said that the environment protection legislations, which grant the boards wide powers also allow them to issue compensatory orders.
In Bharat Jhunjhunwala v. Union of India (2019), the Court refused to stop the government from shrinking a Turtle Wildlife Sanctuary to make way for inland waterway ships. Expert committees had cleared it, the Court said, and it would not interfere without “substantial and compelling reasons” proving irreversible damage. Can the environment prove its own destruction before the Court would lift a finger? In Gupta Kashi Seva Trust v. U.O.I. (2025), a PIL challenging a 17,000 MW project in Sonbhadra for violating forest and wildlife laws was dismissed because petitioners had not first approached the very authorities they were suing. A massive ecological project sailed through on a procedural technicality.
The Allahabad High Court’s record, therefore, is not one of absence but inconsistency. At its best, the Court reads environmental law purposively, protects local governance, and refuses to let extractive industry hide behind technical readings. At its weakest, it treats expert clearance as near-conclusive, procedure as a gatekeeping weapon, and citizen petitioners as irritants. The result is a jurisprudence that knows the language of ecological protection but does not always carry its burden.
The tale of the Rajasthan High Court
In Dinesh Bothra v. State of Rajasthan (2015), when the State Government deliberately amended its Minor Mineral Concession Rules to bypass the Supreme Court’s mandate requiring environmental clearances for mining leases under five hectares, the High Court struck down the rules. The Court issued a scathing indictment of the State, accusing it of “brazenly with impunity… plundering the non-renewable natural wealth of the State” and prioritizing “shortsighted commercial purposes” over inter-generational equity. Similarly, in Heritage Preservation Society v. State of Rajasthan (2012), the Court invoked the Public Trust Doctrine to quash a 99-year lease granted to a private developer to build a seven-star hotel in the catchment area of the Mansagar Lake (Jal Mahal). The Court decisively ruled that natural resources are held in trust for the public and cannot be siphoned off for private commercial exploitation.
This protective streak extends to its treatment of polluters and preservation of flora. In M/S Asheshwar Gramodyog Samiti v. Rajasthan State Pollution Control Board (2010), the Court upheld the closure of polluting stone crushers by explicitly applying the Supreme Court’s reversal-of-proof doctrine, placing the heavy onus on the polluter to prove their operations were environmentally benign, noting that the surrounding area was protected forest. As recently as 2024, in the Suo Motu In Re: Save Thy Trees case, the Court intervened proactively to halt the proposed felling of 1.19 lakh trees for a pumped storage project in the Shahbad Block, reaffirming that the right to a healthy environment is a core facet of Article 21.
Yet, when faced with major industrial interests or strict procedural challenges, the Court has increasingly retreated into hyper-technicality, effectively neutralising environmental regulators.
In Papapuri v. State of Rajasthan (2023), the Court permitted the transfer of vast tracts of vital village Gochar (pasture) lands to the JPMIA Development Authority for an industrial corridor. Rejecting the petitioners’ arguments regarding the destruction of cattle habitats and sustainable development, the Court prioritized the “larger public interest” of national industrial infrastructure over local ecological preservation, accepting the State’s mere promise to set apart alternative lands elsewhere.
Furthermore, the Court has begun to use administrative loopholes to shield commercial projects from strict environmental scrutiny. In Kanha Hotels And Spa Pvt. Ltd. v. Union of India (2026), the Court quashed the National Board for Wildlife’s refusal to grant clearance to a hotel project located within the regulated 1-km eco-sensitive zone of the Nahargarh Wildlife Sanctuary. Instead of applying the precautionary principle, the Court labelled the Wildlife Board’s decision “arbitrary” and “non-speaking,” ruling that the hotel qualified as an “existing unit” that could not be subjected to the retrospective rigors of newer Eco-Sensitive Zone notifications.
The Aravallis
Before we move on from Rajasthan, an important detour through the Aravallis is necessary. The range, 670 kilometres of the oldest fold mountains in the country, runs across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi, which is precisely why no single High Court has been able to give it a coherent jurisprudence. Rajasthan houses the longest stretch of the range and the bulk of its mining pressure, but the protective architecture has, for the last two years, sat almost entirely with the Supreme Court — and the Supreme Court itself has, over the last six months, struggled visibly to hold a position.
On November 20, 2025, a Bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai accepted a Centre-backed definition of the Aravallis: any landform rising 100 metres or more above the local relief, with a 500-metre buffer clustered into the range. A moratorium on new mining leases across all four states was imposed pending preparation of a Management Plan for Sustainable Mining by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education. The decision was praised for its scope and immediately attacked for its arithmetic — the 100-metre threshold, environmentalists argued, would exclude vast stretches of the range that already sit below that line precisely because they have been mined down.
By December 29, 2025, a vacation Bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant did something the Court rarely does. It stayed its own judgment of five weeks earlier, took suo moto cognisance of the controversy, and directed the constitution of a fresh expert committee. As recently as May 25, 2026, the Court was still working out the composition of the new committee, insisting it be compact and that it consult domain experts and stakeholders so that “the public at large is heard. “The Aravalli protection regime is, therefore, presently in abeyance — held together by an executive ban while the Supreme Court reconsiders, in public, what it had endorsed half a year ago. The uncertainty is not procedural. It goes to the foundational question of what the range is, what within it warrants protection, and which institution is competent to determine either. The High Courts of the four jurisdictions across which the range extends have remained outside this discourse. The sequence of developments — the definition of November 20, 2025, the stay of December 29, 2025, the constitution of a fresh expert committee, and the continuing absence of the concerned High Courts — merits separate and sustained treatment, which the authors intend to undertake in a forthcoming piece. For the limited purposes of this Part, it suffices to record that the most ecologically and legally contested mountain range in the country is, at the time of writing, without a settled juridical definition.
Section Two
The Architecture of Accommodation: What the Four Parts Tell Us
Four parts, four regions, several dozen judgments. The exercise was undertaken without making any assumption to the effect that the higher judiciary has failed the environment. The Indian High Courts and their verdicts, analysed in toto, are still the most environmentally literate constitutional courts in the country, and in some pockets, the most environmentally literate constitutional forums in the world. They have given us the public trust doctrine, the precautionary principle as constitutional grammar, the legal personhood of rivers. Any reader who has read until the end, Parts I through III and read Section I of this Part will know that, on a good day, the High Courts can draw a line that the Supreme Court itself, in Vanashakti II, has begun to blur, or even diffuse.
And yet, the cracks are visible. They are not random. They appear in places one can predict or at least anticipate with reasonable likelihood of success. From the coal belts of Hasdeo to the mangroves of Mumbai, from the glaciers of Sonamarg to the Aravallis around Nahargarh, there is a tiny pattern that emerges. Slight but clearly discernible. The High Courts are not, on the whole, abandoning environmental jurisprudence. They are approaching its protection differently, almost trying to herald a new model where this new model is one that allows cracks to show through, when earlier, the older doctrine built a solid wall against the destruction of environment. Per se.
The Four Cracks that have emerged
The first crack is the notion or doctrine of fait accompli. Across all four regions, once a project is under construction, there is an element of finality or inevitability to it. In Hasdeo, the Division Bench observed that projects which have “attained substantial completion” require a balancing of competing interests. In Bandra Reclamation, the Bombay High Court read clearance conditions imposed in 1999 as not surviving subsequent regulatory updates, twenty-six years after the reclamation had been done on the strength of those very conditions. In Char Dham, the Supreme Court, found itself reviewing a road that had already been cut into the mountain face. In Vivek Nair vs. SEIAA set of matters, the Delhi High Court quashed criminal complaints against builders who had commenced –not lawfully –excavation without clearance, finding in their “bona fide belief” a reason to call the prosecution “hyper-technical.” The pattern is identical: by the time the case is heard, the harm (caused by the environmental violation/destruction) is so deep that undoing it is projected like a second harm. The legal vocabulary used to describe this is “balancing” or “comity” or “reasonable construction,” but its mechanics are simpler. The court does not want to be the institution that orders demolition or shutdown of an asset already capitalised at thousands of crores.
The doctrinal infrastructure of environmental law was designed to prevent precisely this state of affairs from arising. When that infrastructure works, the case is heard before the digging starts. When it fails, the digging itself becomes the argument against stopping it.
The second crack is the selective use of locus standi. The same High Court that admitted the petition of a single journalist in Ratan Kumar Jain, in Chhattisgarh, and used the occasion to declare that we have “borrowed” trees from our children, dismissed the petition of thirty-eight named tribal residents in Amrit Lal Bhagat for want of a Gram Sabha resolution! The same Allahabad High Court that purposively read the Supreme Court’s Deepak Kumar directive to bring major minerals within the environmental clearance regime, dismissed the Sonbhadra PIL in Gupta Kashi Seva Trust for failure to first approach the very authorities being sued. The doctrine of locus has not changed. The Bhagwati-Krishna Iyer tradition of relaxed standing for the marginalised is still good law, still cited, still respected. But it is no longer evenly applied. If you want to look at it with optimism, there are considerable number of aberrations which cannot yet be read as a pattern, as far as questioning locus standi is concerned, but are to be studied. If you want to adorn the hat of someone who follows the rule of three, there seems to be a pattern, where the examination of locus standi is dependent: it expands when the petitioner is well-resourced and the project small; it contracts when the petitioner is disadvantaged, poor, tribal, or rural, and the project is backed by an ambitious state.
The third crack is the slow conversion of the polluter-pays principle into a substitute for the precautionary principle. The two doctrines are not interchangeable. The precautionary principle prevents harm; polluter-pays repairs it. Justice Ujjwal Bhuyan, in his Vanashakti II dissent, called the swap “a step in retrogression,” and the four parts of this study supply the evidentiary basis for what he meant.
In the Uttarakhand “land banks” decision, the High Court praised the State for setting up readymade compensatory afforestation plots that allow infrastructure developers to pay a pre-fixed cost and proceed. In the Bombay High Court’s Versova–Bhayandar order, a complete framework of compensatory afforestation in 1:3 ratio, a Rs. 17.74-crore plantation deposit, and a Rs. 233.98-crore restoration corpus were treated as constituting the public-interest exception under the 2018 Mangroves judgment. In the Hasdeo Aranya single-judge order, the suggestion was that the loss of community forest rights could be made good in money. In each of these cases, the money pays, and the forest, or the mangrove, or the glacier feed-zone, does not come back. The polluter-pays principle, in its proper form — imposed on identified violators after a finding of breach— survives. Used in advance, as a tariff for ecological destruction, it does not.
The fourth crack is the deference to expert clearance. The Delhi High Court, in Aman Lekhi and M/S Netgear, held that it could not look into the “quality of material” or “sufficiency” of executive satisfaction, and could not “sit in judgment over the wisdom of the Government” in the appointment of Expert Appraisal Committee members. The Allahabad High Court, in Bharat Jhunjhunwala, refused to stop the shrinking of a Turtle Wildlife Sanctuary because “expert committees had cleared it.” The Rajasthan High Court, in Kanha Hotels and Spa, called the National Board for Wildlife’s refusal of clearance for a hotel in the Nahargarh eco-sensitive zone “arbitrary” and “non-speaking.” The Bombay High Court, in Versova–Bhayandar, took the regulators’ clearance and the petitioner’s mitigation affidavits as sufficient. The difficulty is that environmental jurisprudence in India was built precisely on the assumption that expert clearances would be examined, not deferred to. M.K. Ranjitsinh, Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum, M.V. Nayudu — all proceed on the premise that a court can interrogate the science. The Jharkhand High Court, in Anand Kumar, did exactly that, going so far as to unpack the composition of an Expert Committee that turned out to contain only one environmental engineer. That is the older posture. The newer posture treats the clearance as a stamp the court is asked to honour.
What the Pattern Predicts
If one combines these four cracks, the conditions under which they appear are not mysterious. They appear where the economic interest on the other side of the case is large; where the project is state-backed or sovereign-flavoured! Or if the affected community is dispersed, tribal, rural, or otherwise litigation-poor; and where construction has progressed far enough for the court to be addressing reparation rather than prevention. Conversely, where the case pits citizens against a defaulting regulator with no built infrastructure on the other side — the Sawantwadi-Dodamarg corridor, the Wular Lake authority’s failures, the Mumbai Air Pollution suo moto, the Vivek Kumar Sharma notification, the Saproon Valley vehicular pressure — the older protective vocabulary holds intact. The core has not collapsed. It has been quarantined to a few cases.
The implication is uncomfortable. The High Courts are still capable of doing what they have always done. Capability is not the question. The question is what triggers the capability and what triggers its retreat.
Why This Matters, Now
Return, for a moment, to the El Nino that began this Part. The country is entering a decade in which the environmental caseload before the High Courts will not be smaller. It will be larger. There will be more disputes over water allocation as rivers run leaner, more over forest cover as heat domes spread, more over urban air as Air Quality Indices touch numbers that did not exist on the scale a decade ago, more over coastal land as sea levels rise on a coast that has already been reclaimed beyond its hydrological tolerance. And the institutional reflex that has been observed in these four parts — the gravitational pull of the fait accompli, the asymmetric locus, the cash-for-ecology swap, the deference to clearance — will be tested by a class of cases for which it was never designed. The cases will arrive faster than the projects can be finished. The harm will arrive faster than the compensation can be priced.
It is for this reason that the cracks identified in these four parts cannot be treated lightly. They are load-bearing assumptions about who carries the cost of ecological uncertainty. Under the older posture, the developer carried it; the precautionary principle put the burden on the proponent to show that harm would not occur. Under the newer posture, the citizen carries it; the burden has shifted to the petitioner to demonstrate, with evidence the petitioner cannot afford to gather, that harm has already occurred or will inevitably occur. Between these two postures lies the gap that will widen as the climate worsens.
A Concluding Note
It is unwise, in writing about the higher judiciary, to lapse into either eulogy or indictment. Neither register tells the truth. The truth, as best as this four-part study can read it, is that the Indian High Courts know what to do, have done it before, and continue to do it where the conditions allow. The conditions, however, are narrowing.
The pattern of the last decade — the Vanashakti II majority, the Hasdeo dismissals, the Versova mangrove permission, the Joshimath delay, the Char Dham strategic-corridor reasoning and the other cases discussed — is not the pattern of an institution losing its environmental instinct. It is the pattern of an institution choosing, case by case, when to deploy that instinct and when to set it aside.
What the next decade will require is not a new doctrine. The doctrines are already there: precaution, public trust, polluter-pays in its proper register, intergenerational equity, the constitutional grounding of Articles 21, 48A, and 51 A (g). What it will require is that the High Court’s apply these doctrines with the same vigour to coal mines as they apply to stone crushers, to bullet trains as they apply to riverside hotels, to highways as they apply to brick kilns, to coastal roads as they apply to slaughterhouses without licences. The asymmetry observed in this study is not a feature of the law. It is a feature of the choice the courts are making within the law. And the choice can be unmade. The judicial instinct to be the protector of environment, whether it scales to meet a climate-changed docket is the question on which the next decade of Indian environmental law will turn.
The faith that people have placed in the higher judiciary, repeatedly, has rarely been misplaced. It is too early to say it has been misplaced now. However, it is not too early to say that the institution, whose word can stay a notification, halt a felling, and demolish a building, owes that faith something more than the carefully weighed accommodations of recent years. It owes India and Indians a return to the precautionary principle with the seriousness it once deployed. It owes the citizen the same threshold of standing it grants the developer. In addition, it owes the river, the mangrove, the gochar, and the glacier the recognition that, when they are gone, no quantum of compensation, however calibrated, brings them back. This recognition would not be a new thing, if the courts end up giving it. It is the oldest doctrine in this field. It is what the Indian High Courts said when they were at their best. It is what they need to revert to, and repeatedly say, again.
(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)
Related:
Unending Adjudication: The Vanashakti reversal and environmental finality in India
Cracks in Environmental Jurisprudence: A study of central India’s High Courts
Cracks in Environmental Jurisprudence: The Bombay High Court’s shifting language