Authored By: Gagan Singh Thakur
LCIT
INTRODUCTION
When the Supreme Court of India decided M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India in 2024, it took a step that no earlier bench had taken so directly: it declared that citizens hold a constitutional right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change.[1] The finding did not emerge from a dispute over national emissions targets. It arose from a case about transmission lines built to protect a single endangered bird, the Great Indian Bustard. Even so, the Court used the occasion to place climate protection within Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution.
For decades before this judgment, Indian courts had steadily widened the meaning of the right to life under Article 21 to reach environmental harm, assisted by the directive principle in Article 48A and the citizen’s duty in Article 51A(g).[2] Ranjitsinh is the most recent, and arguably the most consequential, step in that development. Yet recognising a right on paper is not the same as protecting it in practice, and India’s environmental regime remains scattered across statutes and regulators that were never built with a warming planet in mind.
This article argues that judicial recognition of climate-related rights marks genuine constitutional progress, but cannot substitute for the comprehensive legislative framework that climate governance ultimately requires. It first sets out the constitutional and statutory framework, then traces the case law culminating in Ranjitsinh, assesses what judicial recognition can and cannot deliver, and closes with proposals for reform.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL AND STATUTORY FRAMEWORK
Article 21 and the Right to a Healthy Environment
India’s Constitution contains no clause that names a right to a clean environment or protection from climate change. What it contains instead is Article 21, a short guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except by procedure established by law. Everything that follows in Indian environmental jurisprudence flows from the judiciary’s decision to read that guarantee expansively.
The turning point came in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, where the Supreme Court held that the right to life extends to the right to enjoy pollution-free water and air.[3] The reasoning was simple but far-reaching: a life lived amid contaminated water or toxic air is not the life Article 21 was written to protect, regardless of whether a person remains technically alive. Virender Gaur v. State of Haryana carried the principle further, holding that life with human dignity necessarily includes the preservation of ecological balance and freedom from pollution, and describing environmental protection as a constitutional responsibility rather than a matter left to administrative discretion.[4]
Read together, these decisions mark a shift in how Article 21 is understood. It no longer guards merely against the physical taking of life; it protects the conditions that make a life worth living. A degraded environment, on this view, is not simply an inconvenience or a public-health statistic. It is a constitutional injury.
Articles 48A and 51A(g)
Two further provisions reinforce this framework, though neither operates as an independently enforceable right in the manner of Article 21. Article 48A, inserted by the Forty-Second Amendment of 1976, directs the State to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the country’s forests and wildlife.[5] Article 51A(g) imposes a corresponding duty on every citizen to protect and improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife.[6]
Courts have repeatedly invoked both provisions, not to found a cause of action on their own, but to demonstrate that environmental protection carries constitutional weight shared across the State, the citizenry and the judiciary. Their combined effect is to make environmental responsibility a value embedded in the constitutional text itself, even where it cannot be directly litigated.
The Statutory Layer
Constitutional principle operates alongside, and depends on, ordinary legislation. The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 gives the Central Government broad authority to act for environmental protection: Section 3 allows it to take any measures it considers necessary, and Section 5 permits directions that can include the closure or regulation of industries.[7] The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 created a dedicated forum for environmental disputes, tasked under Section 20 with applying the principles of sustainable development, precaution and polluter liability.[8]
These instruments give regulators real tools, but they were built to address discrete sources of pollution and specific projects. Climate change is a different kind of problem. Its causes are diffuse, its consequences unfold over decades, and no single statute or regulatory body was designed to manage it as a whole.
III. FROM POLLUTION CONTROL TO A RIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE
The Early Cases
Environmental jurisprudence in India did not begin with grand constitutional pronouncements. It began with specific, often local, disputes over pollution. M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, the long-running litigation concerning contamination of the River Ganga, is emblematic of this phase.[9] The Court took a firm line with industries and authorities that treated environmental compliance as optional, establishing early on that economic activity could not simply override public health.
Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India moved the law from firm-handed enforcement toward structured principle. The Court held that sustainable development, the precautionary principle and the polluter-pays principle all form part of Indian environmental law.[10] The precautionary principle matters enormously for climate change specifically, because much environmental harm cannot be undone once it occurs; waiting for scientific certainty before acting can itself cause irreversible damage. The polluter-pays principle, meanwhile, ties the cost of harm to its source rather than leaving it to fall on the public or on future generations.
M.K. Ranjitsinh and the Recognition of a Climate Right
Ranjitsinh is the point at which this line of reasoning met climate change directly. The dispute, on its facts, concerned overhead transmission cables that threatened the Great Indian Bustard, one of the world’s most critically endangered birds, and the tension between renewable energy infrastructure and species conservation. In the course of resolving it, the Supreme Court went well beyond the immediate facts. It held that Article 14’s guarantee of equality and Article 21’s guarantee of life must both be read in light of the effects of climate change, and that people possess a right to be free from those adverse effects.[11]
The Court tied this right to health, food, water and basic survival, all of which climate change threatens in increasingly visible ways.[12] It also gave the right an equality dimension: climate harm does not fall evenly across society, and communities with the fewest resources typically bear the heaviest burden.[13] This is a genuine doctrinal advance. Earlier cases folded environmental protection into the right to life as one aspect among others; Ranjitsinh names protection from climate change as a distinct constitutional guarantee in its own right.
That said, the judgment should not be read as handing courts a general mandate over climate policy. The Court was defining a constitutional boundary, not designing an emissions strategy. Scientific, economic and technological choices about how to meet that boundary remain, as they should, with the elected branches of government.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
What Recognition Achieves
Naming climate protection as a constitutional right does real work. It moves climate harm out of the category of pure policy debate and into the category of enforceable constitutional standard, meaning that governmental action, or inaction, can now be tested against Articles 14 and 21 rather than judged solely on political grounds. The equality dimension is especially significant in the Indian context, where the people least responsible for emissions, and least able to adapt to floods, heatwaves or water scarcity, are frequently the ones who suffer most. A constitutional framework built around equality forces that disparity into view rather than allowing it to be treated as an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of development.
Recognition also creates a form of accountability that did not exist before. Decisions about energy infrastructure, land use and industrial permits must now, at least in principle, reckon with their constitutional consequences rather than being assessed purely as matters of economic efficiency.
Where Judicial Power Runs Out
None of this means courts are well suited to running climate policy in detail. Decisions about the pace of the energy transition, sectoral emissions targets, the choice between competing technologies, and how to fund adaptation measures require expertise and democratic legitimacy that litigation cannot supply. Judges hear the cases that come before them; they cannot survey the economy as a whole or weigh competing sectoral interests the way a legislature can.
There is also a risk in over-relying on courts: constant judicial intervention in specific disputes can produce inconsistent standards over time, especially where environmental cases pit conservation against development, employment or local livelihoods. The more sustainable role for the judiciary is one of supervision rather than substitution, one where courts insist on lawful and rational decision-making but leave the architecture of climate policy to legislation and accountable executive action.
A Legal Landscape Without a Centre
The deeper problem is structural. India has no single climate statute. What it has instead is the Environment (Protection) Act, the National Green Tribunal Act, and a further set of laws covering forests, wildlife, water and air pollution, none of which were drafted with an integrated climate framework in mind. Each addresses its own slice of the problem competently enough, but nothing knits them together, sets measurable national targets, or assigns clear institutional responsibility for climate adaptation as distinct from conventional pollution control.
A dedicated climate law would not need to replace this existing architecture. Its task would be coordination: clarifying which authority is responsible for what, establishing targets that can actually be measured and reported, and creating legal duties around adaptation and resilience for the communities most exposed to climate harm. Without that coordinating layer, constitutional recognition risks becoming a right that exists mainly in judgments rather than in the day-to-day machinery of government.
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
India is not alone in reaching for constitutional and human-rights reasoning to address climate change; courts in a number of jurisdictions have taken similar routes, treating climate harm as an issue that touches life, health, dignity and equality rather than as a purely technical or economic question. What that international experience shows, however, is that litigation on its own has never been sufficient. Climate change cuts across energy, transport, agriculture, industry and urban planning simultaneously, and no court, however ambitious, can govern all of those sectors through case-by-case adjudication.
The lesson worth drawing is not that India should import a foreign legal model wholesale, but that judicial protection works best when legislation and institutions do the sustained, cross-sectoral work that courts cannot. India’s own circumstances, in particular the need to expand energy access and reduce poverty while also cutting emissions, mean that any statutory framework must be built around equity and a just transition rather than copied from jurisdictions facing a different set of trade-offs.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR REFORM
Building on the constitutional foundation Ranjitsinh has laid, several concrete reforms would help convert recognition into protection. Parliament should enact a comprehensive climate law that fixes institutional responsibility and creates transparent mechanisms for climate governance, rather than leaving coordination to informal arrangements between ministries. Climate impact assessment should become a standard part of appraising major public projects, extending beyond immediate local pollution to account for foreseeable, longer-term climate consequences. Adaptation deserves far more legal attention than it currently receives, since climate justice is not only about cutting future emissions but also about protecting people already living with heat stress, flooding and water shortages. Meaningful participation by vulnerable communities in climate-related decision-making should be built into the process itself, rather than being confined to after-the-fact litigation once harm has already occurred. Finally, Union, State and local authorities need far better coordination, since climate change does not respect administrative boundaries and fragmented implementation can undo even a well-designed policy.
None of these reforms would diminish the judiciary’s role. They would instead give courts a clearer statutory yardstick against which to measure governmental conduct, strengthening rather than displacing the constitutional foundation that Ranjitsinh has now established.
VII. CONCLUSION
Indian environmental constitutionalism has travelled a long distance from its starting point in disputes over specific pollutants. Subhash Kumar and Virender Gaur first tied environmental quality to the dignity Article 21 protects; Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum added the precautionary and polluter-pays principles as working tools of environmental law. M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India carries that trajectory to its most recent point, recognising a distinct constitutional right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change under Articles 14 and 21.
That recognition matters. Climate change bears directly on health, livelihood, equality and the basic conditions of a dignified life, and it is right that the Constitution now says so in explicit terms. But a right announced in a judgment is not the same as a right delivered in practice. Courts can compel lawful and rational decision-making; they cannot draft an emissions strategy, allocate a national budget, or coordinate the dozens of institutions that climate governance touches.
The way forward is not a choice between courts and legislatures but a division of labour between them. Constitutional recognition should set the floor below which no policy may fall; legislation, institutional coordination and genuine participation by affected communities should build the structure above it. India’s courts have done their part. What remains is for the rest of the constitutional system to catch up.
REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Constitutional Provision
Constitution of India, arts. 14, 21, 48A, 51A(g).
Cases
M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, (1988) 1 SCC 471 (India).
M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 280 (India).
Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, (1991) 1 SCC 598 (India).
Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 647 (India).
Virender Gaur v. State of Haryana, (1995) 2 SCC 577 (India).
Legislation
Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, No. 29 of 1986 (India).
National Green Tribunal Act, 2010, No. 19 of 2010 (India).
International Materials
United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm Declaration (1972).
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992).
Secondary Sources
Shyam Divan & Armin Rosencranz, Environmental Law and Policy in India (2d ed., Oxford University Press 2001).
[1]M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 280, ¶¶ 24–27 (India). See especially ¶ 27.
[2]INDIA CONST. arts. 21, 48A, 51A(g).
[3]Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, (1991) 1 SCC 598 (India).
[4]Virender Gaur v. State of Haryana, (1995) 2 SCC 577, ¶ 7 (India).
[5]INDIA CONST. art. 48A.
[6]INDIA CONST. art. 51A(g).
[7]Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, No. 29 of 1986, §§ 3, 5, India Code.
[8]National Green Tribunal Act, 2010, No. 19 of 2010, § 20, India Code.
[9]M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, (1988) 1 SCC 471 (India).
[10]Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 647 (India).
[11]M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 280, ¶ 27 (India).
[12]Id. ¶ 25.
[13]Id. ¶¶ 25–26.
