Environmental Laws and Bodies in India: Acts and PYQs

India's environmental law is built out of a handful of Acts, a set of statutory bodies and a line of Supreme Court judgments, and examiners test all three. The questions are almost always about a year, a full name or the Act under which a body was set up, so this note fixes each Act with its date and purpose, each body with its parent Act and headquarters, and the international conventions India has joined.

The constitutional base

The Constitution originally said nothing about the environment. The Forty-second Amendment of 1976 inserted Article 48A, a directive principle under which the state shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country, and Article 51A, clause g, a fundamental duty of every citizen to do the same. The Supreme Court has also read the right to a clean and healthy environment into the right to life under Article 21, which is why environmental cases can be brought as writ petitions. Forests and the protection of wild animals and birds were moved from the State List to the Concurrent List by the same amendment.

The major environmental Acts

The Environment (Protection) Act of 1986 is the one to know best. It was passed in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984 and is called an umbrella legislation because it gives the central government wide power to make rules on any matter concerning the environment. The rules on hazardous waste, on noise, on plastic waste, on e-waste and the notification requiring environmental impact assessment for new projects are all made under it. The Public Liability Insurance Act of 1991, which requires industries handling hazardous substances to insure against accidents, came from the same experience.

The bodies that enforce the law

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is the nodal ministry. The Central Pollution Control Board was constituted in 1974 under the Water Act and works with the State Pollution Control Boards, which lay down and enforce standards for effluents and emissions. The National Green Tribunal was established in 2010 under its own Act to decide environmental cases quickly; its principal bench sits in New Delhi, its zonal benches in Bhopal, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai, it is headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court, and it is expected to dispose of an application within six months, with an appeal lying to the Supreme Court. The National Biodiversity Authority, set up under the Act of 2002, has its headquarters at Chennai and works through State Biodiversity Boards and local Biodiversity Management Committees. Other bodies worth remembering are the National Tiger Conservation Authority, the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, the Central Zoo Authority, the Animal Welfare Board of India, and the three old survey organisations: the Botanical Survey of India and the Zoological Survey of India, both headquartered at Kolkata, and the Forest Survey of India at Dehradun, which publishes the India State of Forest Report every two years.

Principles the courts apply

Four ideas run through Indian environmental judgments. The polluter pays principle makes the party causing the damage bear the cost of repairing it. The precautionary principle says that where serious harm is likely, the lack of full scientific certainty is not a reason to postpone action, and it shifts the burden of proof to the developer. Sustainable development, taken from the Brundtland report of 1987, asks that present needs be met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. The public trust doctrine treats air, water, forests and the seashore as resources the state holds in trust for the people. To these the Supreme Court added the rule of absolute liability in the case arising from the oleum gas leak in Delhi in 1986, under which an enterprise carrying on a hazardous activity is liable for harm without any exception.

International conventions India has joined

The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm in 1972 is the starting point; the United Nations Environment Programme was created in the same year with its headquarters at Nairobi, and 5 June is observed as World Environment Day. The Ramsar Convention of 1971, signed in Iran, protects wetlands. CITES, agreed in 1973, controls international trade in endangered species. The Vienna Convention of 1985 and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 deal with substances that deplete the ozone layer, and 16 September is World Ozone Day. The Basel Convention of 1989 covers the movement of hazardous waste, and the Stockholm Convention of 2001 covers persistent organic pollutants. The Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 produced the Convention on Biological Diversity, with the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, under which the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015 were adopted. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, founded in 1948 and based in Switzerland, is not a treaty body but maintains the Red List of threatened species.