Article 51A(g)

In one line

Article 51A(g) is the only environmental provision in the Constitution that binds a private person, and its most important use has been the reverse of what its words suggest: not to make a citizen do anything, but to give a citizen standing to make the State act.

That reversal is the point of this chapter, and it is the difference between an answer that describes the Article and one that explains it.

The text

Part IVA, inserted along with Article 48A by the Forty-second Amendment with effect from 3 January 1977, contains a single Article. Article 51A opens: "It shall be the duty of every citizen of India", and clause (g) is:

"(g) to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wild life, and to have compassion for living creatures".

Word by word

"every citizen of India"

This is the whole significance of the Article. Article 48A binds the State as defined by Article 12 and nobody else. Article 51A(g) binds every citizen. A factory owner, a builder, a farmer burning stubble, a shopkeeper discharging into a drain: none of them is bound by Article 48A and all of them are within Article 51A(g).

Two limits follow from the word "citizen", and both are worth a line. A company is not a citizen, so a corporate polluter is outside the letter of the Article, and the corporation's directors and shareholders are reached only individually. A foreign national is not a citizen either.

"to protect and improve the natural environment"

The same two verbs as Article 48A, in the same order, carrying the same distinction between preventing harm and making things better.

"natural environment"

The word "natural" is in Article 51A(g) and not in Article 48A, which says only "the environment". It is a narrower word: it points to what has not been made by human beings. In practice the courts have not treated the difference as significant, but a student who has read both texts can say that the citizen's duty is expressed in slightly narrower terms than the State's.

"including forests, lakes, rivers and wild life"

An inclusive enumeration, so the list does not limit the phrase. Notice that it is longer than Article 48A's, which mentions only forests and wildlife. Lakes and rivers are named in the citizen's duty and not in the State's.

"and to have compassion for living creatures"

A separate and unusual obligation. It is not framed as protection of a resource. It is framed as an attitude towards animals, and it is the only place in the Constitution where an emotion is made a duty. It is the constitutional peg for animal welfare litigation, for the treatment of captive and performing animals, and for arguments about cruelty that are not arguments about conservation.