Legal Narrative
Abstract
Climate change has migrated from the margins of environmental policy to the centre of Indian constitutional discourse. This article offers a doctrinal and comparative analysis of climate change litigation in India, tracing its evolution from the foundational M.C. Mehta line of Public Interest Litigation, through the expansion of Article 21 in cases such as Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar and Virender Gaur v. State of Haryana, to the first climate-specific petition in Ridhima Pandey v. Union of India and, finally, to the Supreme Court's express recognition of a constitutional right against the adverse effects of climate change in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024). It situates these developments against comparative precedents from the Netherlands, Pakistan and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and examines the institutional role of the National Green Tribunal. The article argues that while judicial innovation has meaningfully advanced climate jurisprudence, its structural limitations in causation, technical capacity and separation of powers make it an inadequate substitute for comprehensive climate legislation and institutional reform.
Keywords
Climate Change Litigation; Article 21; Environmental Constitutionalism; M.C. Mehta; M.K. Ranjitsinh; Ridhima Pandey; National Green Tribunal; Inter-generational Equity; Comparative Climate Law.
I. Introduction
Climate change has emerged as one of the most profound environmental and human challenges of the contemporary era, and its impacts are especially acute in countries such as India, where large sections of the population depend directly on climate-sensitive sectors including agriculture, fisheries and forest-based livelihoods.[1] Despite the scale of the crisis, India's legal response remains largely indirect: the country has no comprehensive, dedicated climate-change statute, and climate concerns are instead addressed through broader environmental laws and constitutional provisions, producing fragmented and sometimes inconsistent legal outcomes.
In this legislative vacuum, the judiciary has assumed an increasingly important role. Indian courts have a long tradition of expanding fundamental rights through purposive constitutional interpretation, particularly in environmental matters, and this article traces that tradition from its origin in the M.C. Mehta litigation to its present culmination in the constitutional recognition of climate rights, before turning to a critical assessment of what judicial innovation can and cannot achieve.
II. Constitutional and Statutory Framework for Climate Protection A. Constitutional Provisions
Although the Constitution does not expressly refer to climate change, it supplies a durable foundation for environmental protection through the following provisions:
• Article 21 — the right to life and personal liberty, interpreted to include the right to a clean and healthy environment.[2]
• Article 14 — the guarantee of equality, invoked where climate risk is distributed arbitrarily or disproportionately.
• Article 48A — a Directive Principle obliging the State to protect and improve the environment and safeguard forests and wildlife.
• Article 51A(g) — a Fundamental Duty of citizens to protect and improve the natural environment.
Articles 48A and 51A(g) are not independently enforceable, but courts have consistently treated them as interpretive aids that inform and strengthen the content of Article 21.[3]
B. Statutory Framework
India's environmental regulatory regime is built on a cluster of sectoral statutes rather than a single climate code:
• The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, the umbrella legislation for environmental regulation.[4]
• The Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981.[5]
• The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974.[6]
• The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010, establishing a specialised environmental forum.[7]
No provision in this framework defines emission-reduction targets, institutional responsibility for climate mitigation, or climate-specific accountability standards; climate disputes are, as a result, litigated indirectly through constitutional remedies or general environmental statutes.
III. The M.C. Mehta Legacy: Doctrinal Foundations of Environmental Constitutionalism
Before climate change entered judicial vocabulary, an extraordinary sequence of litigation brought by M.C. Mehta supplied the doctrinal architecture on which climate jurisprudence would later be built. In the Oleum Gas Leak case, arising from a leak at a Delhi fertiliser plant, the Supreme Court evolved the doctrine of absolute liability, holding that an enterprise engaged in a hazardous activity owes an unqualified, non-delegable duty to the surrounding community, unrelieved by the defences available under ordinary tort law, and affirmed that environmental protection is an essential component of the right to life under Article 21.[8]
In the Ganga Pollution case, the Court compelled tanneries and municipal bodies along the river to install effluent treatment, exercising continuing supervisory jurisdiction over compliance rather than issuing a single dispositive order.[9] The Court also embraced the public trust doctrine, holding that the State holds natural resources in trust for the public and must protect them from private exploitation — a principle of particular relevance to the atmosphere as a shared resource.[10] The vehicular pollution litigation, running through the 1990s and 2000s, directed the conversion of Delhi's public transport to compressed natural gas, drawing the Court into environmental management of a kind more commonly associated with administrative agencies. Across these strands, the polluter pays and precautionary principles were absorbed into Indian law, supplying the substantive content of an Article 21 environmental guarantee that did not yet speak in the language of climate change.
IV. The Expanding Scope of Article 21
The doctrinal foundation of environmental rights under Article 21 was consolidated in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, where the Supreme Court held that the right to life includes the right to enjoyment of pollution-free water and air, bringing environmental protection squarely within the ambit of constitutional guarantee.[11] This interpretive move owed less to express constitutional text than to the Court's broader post-Maneka Gandhi project of infusing Article 21 with substantive content.[12]
The scope of Article 21 was further strengthened in Virender Gaur v. State of Haryana, where the Court held that environmental protection is essential to the full enjoyment of the right to life and human dignity, and that ecological imbalance undermines the basic conditions necessary for dignified existence justifying judicial intervention even absent explicit statutory safeguards.[13] Read together, Subhash Kumar and Virender Gaur transformed an abstract environmental value into an enforceable legal right, and it is this transformed right that later proved elastic enough to accommodate climate-specific claims.
V. The Emergence of Climate-Specific Litigation: Ridhima Pandey v. Union of India
The first attempt to litigate climate change directly, rather than as an incident of pollution, came in Ridhima Pandey v. Union of India, decided by the National Green Tribunal in 2019.[14] The petitioner, then a child, alleged that the State's failure to take adequate steps to mitigate climate change violated fundamental rights under Articles 14 and 21, invoking inter-generational equity. The Tribunal dismissed the petition, holding that climate concerns were already addressed through existing policies, action plans and international commitments, and granted no substantive relief. Ridhima Pandey is nonetheless significant as the formal entry point of climate change claims into Indian environmental adjudication — it framed the question the Supreme Court would answer differently five years later.
VI. M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024): The Climate-Rights Turn
The occasion for the Supreme Court's most significant climate pronouncement was, improbably, a case about a bird. M.K. Ranjitsinh and Others v. Union of India concerned the Great Indian Bustard, a critically endangered species whose declining population had been attributed partly to collisions with overhead transmission lines in Rajasthan and Gujarat.[15] In 2021, the Court had directed that such lines be undergrounded across an area overlapping India's principal solar and wind energy potential; by 2024, faced with evidence that undergrounding was not universally feasible and risked impeding the renewable energy transition, a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud was asked to reconsider.
In modifying the earlier order, the Court went further than the facts strictly required. It held that the right to life under Article 21, read with the right to equality under Article 14, encompasses a right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change, observing that climate change poses serious threats to equality, life, health and human dignity, and referring as a persuasive interpretive aid rather than a binding obligation to India's commitments under the Paris Agreement.[16] The Court did not hold that this right entitled the petitioners to any particular outcome, still less that it displaced the balancing exercise between conservation and clean energy the case required; it held, more modestly, that climate stability is a condition for the meaningful enjoyment of constitutional rights.
VII. From “Right to Clean Environment” to “Right Against Adverse Effects of Climate Change”
The two formulations are related but not identical. The right to a clean environment, developed through the M.C. Mehta line and consolidated in Subhash Kumar and Virender Gaur, addresses discrete, often localised harms, a polluted river, a toxic gas leak, unsafe ambient air quality susceptible to injunctive or supervisory relief against an identifiable respondent. The right against the adverse effects of climate change addresses a diffuse, cumulative, globally-sourced harm that no single respondent can be made fully to answer for, implicating adaptation and mitigation choices, energy mix, land use, disaster preparedness rather than the cessation of a discrete polluting activity. Whether the newer right is a doctrinal extension of the older one or a distinct constitutional development remains contested; what is clear is that it shifts judicial inquiry from asking whether a specific act caused harm to asking whether governance structures adequately anticipate and distribute climate risk.
VIII. Role of the National Green Tribunal in Climate Adjudication
Established under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010, the NGT was created to provide specialised, expeditious adjudication of environmental disputes involving complex scientific and technical questions, and its mixed composition of judicial and expert members distinguishes it from ordinary courts.[17] The Tribunal has no explicit statutory mandate to adjudicate climate change claims, but engages with climate concerns indirectly through disputes over environmental clearance, industrial pollution, deforestation and large infrastructure projects. In Hanuman Laxman Aroskar v. Union of India, the Supreme Court emphasised the importance of sustainable development, inter-generational equity and rigorous environmental impact assessment in the approval of large-scale development projects principles that continue to guide the NGT's own assessment of projects with long-term ecological consequences.[18] In the absence of clear legislative standards on emission reduction or climate attribution, the Tribunal has tended to defer to executive policy rather than issue binding climate-specific directions a cautious posture that reflects the structural limits of adjudicatory bodies confronting a global, cumulative and policy-intensive phenomenon.
IX. Comparative and Global Perspectives
Indian climate jurisprudence does not evolve in isolation. In Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands, the Dutch Supreme Court held that the government had a legal obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect the rights to life and to private and family life under Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and ordered emissions cut by at least twenty-five percent against 1990 levels the first binding, rights-grounded emissions obligation imposed by a national court.[19]
In Pakistan Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan, the Lahore High Court held that the government's delay in implementing its National Climate Change Policy violated the rights to life, human dignity and property guaranteed under the Pakistani Constitution, and directed the establishment of a standing Climate Change Commission to oversee implementation.[20] At the international level, the UN Human Rights Committee, in Teitiota v. New Zealand, recognised that climate change poses serious threats to the ef ective enjoyment of the right to life, particularly for populations exposed to environmental degradation and extreme climatic events, even though the individual claim before it was dismissed on the facts.[21] Although none of these decisions binds Indian courts, together they evidence a converging global judicial consensus that climate obligations are justiciable and closely bound up with fundamental rights a consensus M.K. Ranjitsinh both draws upon and contributes to.
X. Contemporary Challenges
Judicial innovation notwithstanding, Indian climate litigation faces structural constraints that limit its transformative potential:
• Absence of comprehensive legislation. India has no statute defining emission-reduction targets, institutional responsibility or climate-specific accountability standards, forcing courts to rely on constitutional interpretation without clear statutory guidance.[22]
• Technical and institutional limits. Climate litigation involves complex scientific evidence modelling, emissions data, long-term risk projections that courts, including the NGT, are not always equipped to assess independently.[23]
• Causation and attribution. Climate change results from cumulative global emissions, making it difficult to establish the demonstrable nexus between a specific State action and environmental harm that Indian courts traditionally require.
• Separation of powers. Climate policy involves trade-offs between environmental protection, economic development and energy security; judicial directions on infrastructure or energy policy risk encroaching on executive and legislative domains.
• Access to justice. Procedural barriers, evidentiary burdens and litigation costs constrain the participation of climate-vulnerable communities, risking a jurisprudence confined to elite or urban petitioners.[24]
XI. Critical Analysis
Indian climate jurisprudence has developed overwhelmingly through interpretation rather than legislation, a pattern with real costs. Article 21 is a capacious but blunt instrument: it can compel courts to notice climate harm, but offers little guidance on how competing goods energy access, industrial growth, biodiversity, distributive justice ought to be weighed, and case-by-case litigation is a poor mechanism for allocating a systemic, cumulative harm like greenhouse gas emissions.[25] The risk of excessive judicialisation is real: courts assuming responsibility for polycentric climate trade-offs without the institutional apparatus to manage them may produce decisions that are doctrinally bold but practically unstable, as the 2021–2024 trajectory of Ranjitsinh itself suggests. Litigation has also done comparatively little to address distributive and inter-generational justice in any granular sense; its beneficiaries to date have been species and ecosystems as much as the human communities most exposed to climate vulnerability.
XII. Recommendations
• Enact comprehensive climate legislation. A statutory framework defining emission-reduction obligations, institutional responsibility and accountability standards would reduce reliance on ad hoc constitutional interpretation.
• Clarify the NGT's climate mandate. Explicit legislative recognition of climate change within the Tribunal's jurisdiction would allow it to address climate disputes more coherently, while respecting the executive's policy-making role.
• Integrate scientific expertise. Permanent expert panels and clearer evidentiary standards would help courts and tribunals assess technically complex climate evidence.
• Widen access to climate justice. Procedural innovation and greater community engagement are necessary if climate litigation is to serve vulnerable populations rather than remain confined to elite or symbolic cases.
XIII. Conclusion
The doctrinal path from the Ganga Pollution litigation to Ranjitsinh is continuous rather than abrupt: absolute liability and the polluter pays principle established that environmental harm could be a constitutional wrong; Subhash Kumar and Virender Gaur extended that wrong into a substantive right to a clean environment; Ridhima Pandey posed, without yet answering, the specifically climate-framed version of that right; and Ranjitsinh answered it, extending constitutional protection across the diffuse, planetary scale of climate change. Viewed alongside Urgenda, Leghari and Teitiota, this evolution places Indian courts within a genuine global judicial conversation about the constitutional status of climate harm. What it does not do is resolve India's climate governance problem: courts remain institutionally constrained in addressing emission targets, energy transitions and long-term climate risk, and judicial intervention, however doctrinally significant, should function as a catalyst and safeguard not a substitute for coordinated legislative and institutional action.
Table of Authorities (Selected)
Constitution of India, arts. 14, 21, 32, 48A, 51A(g), 226.
Environment (Protection) Act, No. 29 of 1986, India Code.
Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, No. 14 of 1981, India Code.
Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, No. 6 of 1974, India Code.
National Green Tribunal Act, No. 19 of 2010, India Code.
Electricity Act, No. 36 of 2003, India Code.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See Lavanya Rajamani, Climate Change and India: Policy, Law and Institutions, 19 Rev. Eur. Comp. & Int'l Envtl. L. 145, 152–54 (2010).
[2] Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, (1991) 1 S.C.C. 598 (India).
[3] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath, (2000) 6 S.C.C. 213 (India).
[4] Environment (Protection) Act, No. 29 of 1986, India Code.
[5] Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, No. 14 of 1981, India Code.
[6] Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, No. 6 of 1974, India Code.
[7] National Green Tribunal Act, No. 19 of 2010, India Code.
[8] M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, A.I.R. 1987 S.C. 1086 (India). [9] M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, A.I.R. 1988 S.C. 1037 (India). [10] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath, (2000) 6 S.C.C. 213 (India).
[11] Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, (1991) 1 S.C.C. 598 (India).
[12] Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, A.I.R. 1978 S.C. 597 (India).
[13] Virender Gaur v. State of Haryana, (1995) 2 S.C.C. 577 (India).
[14] Ridhima Pandey v. Union of India, Original Application No. 187 of 2017 (Nat'l Green Tribunal Jan. 15, 2019) (India).
[15] M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 280 (India).
[16] Paris Agreement, Dec. 12, 2015, T.I.A.S. No. 16-1104.
[17] National Green Tribunal Act, No. 19 of 2010, India Code.
[18] Hanuman Laxman Aroskar v. Union of India, (2019) 15 S.C.C. 401 (India).
[19] Urgenda Found. v. State of the Netherlands, ECLI:NL:HR:2019:2007 (Neth. Dec. 20, 2019).
[20] Leghari v. Fed'n of Pakistan, W.P. No. 25501/2015 (Lah. High Ct. Sept. 4, 2015) (Pak.).
[21] Teitiota v. New Zealand, Human Rights Comm., Commc'n No. 2728/2016, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/127/D/2728/2016 (2020).
[22] See Lavanya Rajamani, supra note 1, at 152–54.
[23] A.P. Pollution Control Bd. v. Prof. M.V. Nayudu, (1999) 2 S.C.C. 718 (India).
[24] Jona Razzaque, Access to Environmental Justice: Role of the Judiciary in India, 32 J. Envtl. L. 365, 378–80 (2020).
[25] See Jacqueline Peel & Hari M. Osofsky, Climate Change Litigation's Regulatory Pathways, 4 J. Envtl. L. 1, 12–15 (2015).
