Environmental laws have long been bypassed, says Jairam Ramesh

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Friday said India’s progressive environmental laws had repeatedly been circumvented and called upon the judiciary to ensure their enforcement in letter and spirit.

The Congress general secretary in charge of communications was responding to edited excerpts from a speech delivered by Supreme Court judge Justice Ujjal Bhuyan at Vivekananda Kendra in Guwahati on 8 August.

Sharing the published excerpts on X, Ramesh described Justice Bhuyan’s observations as a timely and courageous warning with implications for the Supreme Court, High Courts and the National Green Tribunal.

The former Union environment minister said the judge’s central argument concerned what he described as the Supreme Court’s inconsistent approach to the environmental consequences of development and infrastructure projects.

Such inconsistency was itself becoming a threat to environmental protection, Ramesh said, adding that courts had a duty to ensure compliance with the country’s existing laws.

In his address, justice Bhuyan raised questions about how courts should respond when citizens allege that development projects have violated environmental regulations.

He cautioned against dismissing such challenges at the outset merely because numerous infrastructure projects face litigation. While acknowledging that frivolous petitions were sometimes filed, the judge said this could not justify treating every environmental challenge with suspicion.

Justice Bhuyan said India had committed environmentalists who continued to advocate for ecological protection and questioned where they could seek redress if courts closed their doors to them.

A constitutional court’s focus should be on determining whether a project has complied with environmental requirements, he said. Courts should assure citizens that every project — regardless of its scale or nature — adheres to the applicable environmental norms, justice Bhuyan added.

With PTI inputs