Why Environmental Policy Under-Performs

In one line

India's environmental law is well drafted and badly delivered, and the reasons are institutional rather than legislative.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Indian environmental policy under-performs for six reasons: the capacity of the regulator is inadequate to the functions imposed on it; the promoter and the regulator are the same government; policy and programme are not joined to regulation; the instruments do not match the problems that now dominate; compliance is self-reported and sanctions are weak; and the law was made by courts rather than by a political consensus, so implementation has no constituency behind it.

The evidence

State the outcome before the diagnosis, because a criticism without evidence is an opinion.

Air. Concentrations of fine particulate matter across the Indo-Gangetic plain exceed the national ambient standards year after year, on the Central Pollution Control Board's own monitoring.

Water. The Board publishes a list of polluted river stretches which has been in the hundreds for years, and the principal source is untreated municipal sewage rather than industrial effluent.

Groundwater. The Central Ground Water Board classifies a large number of assessment units as over-exploited or critical.

Forest. Cover is broadly stable on the India State of Forest Report's own definition, which counts plantation; the Government's own draft policy of 2018 records that the low quality and low productivity of our natural forests is a serious concern.

Waste. Generation has outrun collection and processing, and a significant proportion is neither processed nor scientifically landfilled.

Land. No dedicated statute exists at all.

The six reasons

Capacity

The subject of the previous chapter. Functions have been added to the State Boards for fifty years without corresponding staff, laboratories or budget; the scientific posts are the ones that go unfilled; and a Board that cannot analyse a sample cannot prove a breach.

The evidence for this as a cause rather than an excuse is that the failures are concentrated exactly where enforcement requires technical work, and are least where the law operates by a single prior approval, as in forest diversion under the Act of 1980.

The promoter is the regulator

The Tiwari Committee said in 1980 that environmental responsibility was scattered across departments whose primary business was something else. Creating a Department and then a Ministry addressed part of it. What was not addressed is that a State Government promotes projects through its industrial development corporation, appoints the State Board, appoints the State Level Environment Impact Assessment Authority, and grants the Category B clearance.

Policy is not joined to regulation

A Plan funds afforestation while the same Government clears forest land. A water policy asks for basin-level management while allocation is decided by tribunal awards between States. A climate action plan runs eight missions while no statute limits an emission. None of these is a contradiction anybody is obliged to resolve, because no instrument reconciles a policy with a regulatory decision.