Prelims: Current events of national and international importance |Polity
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The Supreme Court quashes the Centre’s 2021 Office Memorandum on ex post facto environmental clearance.
It was ruling that any future amnesty under the Environment (Protection) Act must flow from a statutory notification, not an administrative order, and be confined to projects of supervening public interest under the EIA framework of 2006.
An administrative order cannot create a perpetual and parallel regime to grant retrospective authorisation to big-ticket infrastructure projects commenced without prior, valid environmental clearance.
However, the court has not barred retrospective ECs totally.
It has in fact adopted a note of reconciliation and called for "measured regularisation".
The court held that ex post facto environmental regularisation must be restricted to "a narrow, time-bound, reasoned and supervised window", and done only in projects of "supervening public interest".
The judgment will apply prospectively, thus saving projects that got retrospective environment clearances (ECs) from demolition and other punitive measures.
The Supreme Court was using its power under Article 142, which aims to do complete justice in appropriate cases.
It said the office memorandum does not satisfy the test of proportionality and reasonableness and is violative of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution.
India’s EIA framework is built around a simple principle: projects requiring environmental clearance (EC) must obtain it before construction or operations begin.
The 2006 EIA Notification explicitly mandates “prior environmental clearance”, allowing regulators to evaluate ecological impacts, hear public objections and prescribe safeguards before irreversible environmental damage occurs.
Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) comes under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.
