Balancing Development and Environmental Protection in India: The Role of Law, Policy, and the Judiciary

Environmental governance — the institutional arrangements for making decisions — across various sectors: water and air pollution, infrastructure projects, climate negotiations, and the associated environmental jurisprudence in India, formally institutionalised over the last four decades following the Stockholm Conference. Since then, it has increasingly confronted tensions between development-led growth and a rights-oriented judicial discourse. Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India (2000) remains one of the first famous judicial engagements with a direct conflict between developmental imperatives and environmental protection, and has largely been interpreted in a positive light within environmental law scholarship. However, more than two decades since that decision, the trajectory of environmental adjudication suggests a more complex reality.