Article 14 and Arbitrary Environmental Decisions

In one line

Article 21 tells you that a clean environment is protected; Article 14 tells you how the decision that affects it must be made.

Most environmental litigation in India is not about whether the environment matters. It is about a specific decision: a clearance granted, a lease renewed, a regulation relaxed, an area denotified. Article 14 is the provision that tests those decisions, and it is the provision most students leave out of an answer on constitutional protection of the environment.

The text and the doctrine

"14. Equality before law. The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India."

On its face this is about equality between persons. The doctrine that makes it an environmental provision is that arbitrariness is itself a denial of equality. In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, 1978 AIR 597, the Court put it as: "Article 14 has a pervasive processual potency and versatile quality, equalitarian in its soul and allergic to discriminatory diktats. Equality is the antithesis of arbitrariness."

So an arbitrary environmental decision is unconstitutional, and it does not matter whether anyone was treated differently from anyone else. That is what makes Article 14 useful here.

What an arbitrary environmental decision looks like

Four recurring forms, each with authority behind it, and then the case that marks where the route stops.

One: relevant considerations left out

This is Sachidananda Pandey v. State of West Bengal, 1987 AIR 1109. The Court is bound to bear Articles 48A and 51A(g) in mind, and "if relevant considerations are not borne in mind and irrelevant considerations influence the decision, the Court may interfere in order to prevent a likelihood of prejudice to the public".

And the other half. "If the Government is alive to the various considerations requiring thought and deliberation and has arrived at a conscious decision after taking them into account, it may not be for this Court to interfere in the absence of mala fides." The appeal was dismissed on that ground.

The rule that follows. A decision-maker who considered the environmental effect and decided against it survives review. A decision-maker who never considered it does not. Article 14 polices the process.

Two: a decision made on a defective record

Hanuman Laxman Aroskar v. Union of India, AIRONLINE 2019 SC 318. The environmental clearance for a greenfield airport at Mopa in North Goa had been granted on an environmental impact assessment which did not disclose the presence of ecologically sensitive features on the plateau.

Held, the clearance was suspended. An environmental impact assessment which does not disclose material facts vitiates the clearance built on it. The expert appraisal committee must apply its mind to the actual ecological character of the site. The process is not a formality to be completed but a form of due diligence the law requires before a development decision is made.