The Judicial Approach: Taj Trapezium, the Viceregal Lodge and the Aminabad Park

In one line

Three judgments and three techniques: regulate everything around the monument, stop the Government commercialising it, and have the building pulled down.

The Taj: regulate the region

M.C. Mehta v. Union of India (the Taj Trapezium case), AIR 1997 SC 734; (1997) 2 SCC 353, decided 30 December 1996 by Kuldip Singh and Faizan Uddin JJ.

Facts. A petition complained that sulphur dioxide emitted by foundries, chemical and engineering industries, the Mathura refinery and the Ferozabad glass industry combined with atmospheric moisture to form acid rain which was corroding and yellowing the marble of the Taj Mahal, and that the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute and the Varadharajan Committee had recommended the removal of polluting industries from the area. The judgment records that the Taj being a monument on the World Heritage List, the Government of India sought expert advice through UNESCO on the structural and chemical preservation of the monument, and that two experts visited in January 1987 and recommended remedial measures.

Held. The Court applied the precautionary principle and held that the Taj is a monument of international repute whose protection cannot wait for scientific certainty. It directed that the 292 industries within the Taj Trapezium Zone either change over to natural gas as an industrial fuel or relocate outside the zone, that those which did neither must stop functioning with coke or coal, and it made provision for the rights of the workmen of the relocating industries, including continuity of employment, a shifting bonus and gratuity. It noted the green belt around the Taj set up on the recommendation of the Institute.

Why it matters. It is the leading monument case, and it shows a court protecting a monument by regulating an entire industrial region around it. The Taj itself was never the subject of an order; 292 factories were.

The technique to name is the zone. Where the threat to a monument is ambient, an order about the monument is useless, and the Court drew a boundary and legislated inside it. Compare section 20A and section 20B of the 1958 Act, which do the same thing by statute at one hundred and three hundred metres. The Taj Trapezium is a prohibited area on the scale of a district.

And notice the workmen. The Court did not treat the relocation as costless. Continuity of employment, a shifting bonus and gratuity are the reason an answer can call this a sustainable development judgment rather than a preservationist one.

The Viceregal Lodge: refuse the Government

Rajeev Mankotia v. Secretary to the President of India, AIR 1997 SC 2766; (1997) 10 SCC 441, decided 15 May 1997 by K. Ramaswamy and G.B. Pattanaik JJ.