Climate change is now a significant issue in the global environmental narrative, and India’s involvement in treaties such as the “UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, 2015” has established national climate policy and law.While Indian courts have not ruled on many public interest litigations (PILs) seeking to invoke climate change treaties, there is an increasing recognition in judicial decisions of India’s international climate obligations. For example, the Court[1] directed the government to submit steps it would take to protect wetlands in the country during the course of climate change and as per international commitments to maintaining the natural sink of carbons.

Climate related PILs additionally — those questioning unsustainable infrastructure projects, air pollution, and tree felling, for example — are also increasingly using India’s global environment commitments as persuasive bases for judicial intervention.

Evolution of Environmental PIL Through Judicial Activism

The evolution of PIL in Indian environmental jurisprudence is inextricable from the evolution of the Indian judiciary from a traditional dispute-resolver to a purposeful institution engaging with issues of public importance. Environmental pilots in the guise of a judicial innovation, via which the courts can take up these ecological issues for the marginalized, voiceless, and the generation to come. Central to this movement is judicial activism, a philosophy that emphasizes a departure from legal formalism toward a more purposive, participatory, and justice-oriented reading of the law.

Emergence of Judicial Activism in Environmental Matters in India in the Early 1980s This shift was driven by the understanding that environmental degradation most severely affects the poor and that access to justice must expand beyond traditional litigation-based models. Through PIL, as a tool of procedural innovation, courts were able to introduce innovative measures for overcoming procedural hurdles regarding intervention in matters of ecological preservation, construing the right to life within the ambit of Article 21 of the Constitution as one that encompasses the right to a healthy environment.

It was not merely legislative inertia that spurred the judiciary’s foray into environmental protection but also a perceived inadequacy in existing statutory mechanisms that could contend with pressing ecological concerns. In a nation struggling with the realities of breakneck industrialization, urbanization, and resource depletion, PIL was a response to these multifaceted, systemic issues in which courts took an activist role in saving the environment and enjoyed the enforcement of the right to a healthy environment against state and non-state actors in contravention to environmental laws.

[1]M.K. Balakrishnan v. Union of India (2017) 7 SCC 805.