Why Sanctions Under-Deliver, and What 2024 Is Betting On

In one line

Delay, capacity, and the fact that the State is the largest polluter, and what Parliament decided to do about it in 2023 and 2024.

In exam wording: the sanctions against pollution in India have historically under-delivered because prosecutions were slow and rare, because the regulators lacked capacity, because the largest polluters are public bodies against which the sanctions are weakest, and because a determined defendant could delay indefinitely; the reforms of 2023 and 2024 replaced prosecution with administrative penalties assessed by an adjudicating officer, on the calculation that certain moderate sanctions deter better than uncertain severe ones.

The four reasons

One: delay

The evidence is in this book and it should be cited rather than asserted.

Bhopal. The gas escaped in December 1984. The settlement was February 1989, the review October 1991, the restored criminal proceedings ran for a further two decades, and the last civil word came on 14 March 2023. Thirty-nine years. And the 2023 judgment says why that matters: requiring evidence to be led for each claimant three decades later would work in the polluter's favour and to the detriment of the beneficiaries, because time destroys the claimant's proof and not the defendant's.

Bichhri. Judgment in February 1996, with ₹37.385 crore of remediation ordered. Fifteen years later the Supreme Court recorded that the industries had taken no step to restore the village and had complied with none of its directions, keeping the litigation alive by interlocutory applications after the writ, review and curative petitions had all been dismissed, and called the case a classic illustration of men with means succeeding in avoiding compliance with its orders.

And the ordinary case. A prosecution under the pre-2024 section 43 of the Water Act took years and ended in a fine of a few thousand rupees.

The point is not that courts are slow.It is that delay favours the defendant systematically. The polluter continues to operate throughout, keeps the money, and watches the claimant's evidence decay. Every device introduced since 2010 is an answer to that: recovery as arrears of land revenue, the daily additional penalty, environmental compensation as a refundable deposit paid first, the ten per cent pre-depositon appeal, and the offence of not paying within ninety days.

Two: capacity

The regulators are small. A State Pollution Control Board must consent, inspect, sample, analyse, direct and prosecute across every industry in a State, with a laboratory network, a technical staff and a budget none of which has grown with the industry it regulates.

The evidentiary burden was heavy. A prosecution rested on a sample taken under section 21 of the Water Act, with its elaborate notice, division and sealing requirements, and an analyst's report under sections 51 and 52. Each step was a place where a case could fail on procedure rather than on merit.