Environment › Environmental law and institutions
Courts, tribunals and environmental jurisprudence
Environmental law made by judges: Supreme Court and High Court judgments, the National Green Tribunal, principles such as polluter pays and precaution, and climate litigation. Prelims has asked how the National Green Tribunal differs from the Central Pollution Control Board.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2018: how the National Green Tribunal differs from the Central Pollution Control Board
14 Aug 2026 · Prelims and Mains
The doctrines the Court built
Parliament wrote the environmental statutes, but the principles by which they are read were worked out on the bench. The Court took a run of pollution cases in the 1980s and 1990s and left behind four doctrines that every tribunal and High Court now applies as settled law.
- Absolute liability came from the Oleum gas leak case, M.C. Mehta (1987).
- Polluter pays came through Indian Council for Enviro-Legal Action, and the precautionary principle through Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum.
- The public trust doctrine came from the Kamal Nath case, alongside intergenerational equity.
- None of them came from Parliament: the Court built them case by case, which is the legacy in question.
14 Aug 2026 · Prelims and Mains
The Vanashakti dissent
The doctrines are not applied evenly, on the account of a judge who sits on the bench that made them. What he questions is the threshold: who is heard at all, and how closely the Court looks once the respondent is a large project.
- His dissent in the Vanashakti review ranked the precautionary principle above polluter pays, which only repairs harm after the event.
- His view is that a court should test whether a project complies with the norms rather than dismiss petitioners at the threshold.
Also filed elsewhere
- The Agasthyamalai evictions · on Forest laws and forest rights
An encroacher and a recognised rights holder can be standing on the same patch of forest, and an order to clear one of them reaches the other.
- The Jojari · on Water pollution and river rejuvenation
The Jojari carries industrial effluent rather than sewage, and the remedy asked of the court was distance rather than treatment.
- Supreme Court on solid waste as a shared duty · on Solid and plastic waste
The order of 18 August 2026 moved the argument from plants and trucks to households.