Supreme Court narrows post-facto environmental clearance to public interest cases

India's environmental governance framework rests on the precautionary principle — the idea that where there is credible risk of serious or irreversible ecological harm, protective action must precede development activity, not follow it. This principle is embedded in the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, which empowers the Union government to regulate industrial and infrastructure activity to prevent environmental degradation. The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, formalised under EIA Notification, 2006, operationalises this principle by requiring project proponents to obtain prior environmental clearance (EC) from the competent authority before commencing construction or operations.

The constitutional basis for environmental protection is equally robust. The Supreme Court has, over more than two decades, read Article 21 (right to life) expansively to include the right to a clean and healthy environment — a doctrine crystallised in landmark judgments such as Subhash Kumar v State of Bihar and M.C. Mehta v Union of India. The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 further institutionalised environmental adjudication by creating a specialised forum with the power to award compensation and enforce environmental laws. Together, these instruments create a layered architecture of prior assessment, regulatory oversight, and judicial review.

Despite this framework, a persistent tension has existed between ecological safeguards and the pressure to accelerate infrastructure and industrial development. From 2017 onward, the government sought to address the large backlog of projects that had commenced without obtaining mandatory clearances — a phenomenon driven partly by procedural delays and partly by deliberate non-compliance — by introducing mechanisms for post-facto regularisation.