The Judicial Construction of Environmental Rights in India: A Doctrinal Review of Constitutional Jurisprudence and Institutional Enforcement

Author(s): Vivek Gupta and Dr. Narender Kumar

Abstract:

In the absence of an express constitutional right to a healthy environment, the Indian judiciary constructed one over four decades through progressive interpretation of Article 21 of the Constitution, supplemented by an original body of common-law doctrine tailored to the country's developmental and industrial context. This paper offers a systematic doctrinal review of that jurisprudence, tracing its development from the expansion of the right to life in the Doon Valley litigation, through the absolute liability doctrine forged in the aftermath of the 1985 Oleum gas leak, the sustainable development framework and its constituent Polluter Pays and Precautionary Principles articulated in Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum v. Union of India, the public trust doctrine recognised in M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath, and the institutionalisation of specialised environmental adjudication through the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010. The review situates this jurisprudence within the wider literature on judicial activism, environmental constitutionalism, and corporate accountability, drawing on David Boyd's comparative global study of constitutional environmental rights and on recent institutional assessments of the National Green Tribunal's disposal efficiency and enforcement capacity. The review finds that Indian courts have been unusually successful in supplying substantive doctrinal content to environmental protection through rights-based reasoning, but that this judicial achievement has consistently outpaced institutional capacity for implementation: enforcement gaps, compensation-calculation ambiguity, and an absence of centralised monitoring mechanisms recur across independent assessments of the National Green Tribunal, echoing the compensation and accountability shortfalls that marked the Bhopal litigation itself. The paper concludes that consolidating India's environmental rule of law now depends less on further doctrinal innovation than on closing this implementation gap through stronger monitoring institutions and clearer coordination between judicial and statutory mechanisms of environmental governance.

keywords:
Environmental jurisprudence; Article 21; absolute liability; polluter pays principle; precautionary principle; public trust doctrine; National Green Tribunal; judicial activism; India

Pages: 67-74     |    18 View     |    2 Download