The Silent Valley Episode

In one line

A hydroelectric project in a Kerala rainforest was abandoned by the Government and the valley became a national park, and the decision was political rather than judicial.

MU sets this as a short note on the 2018 second-half paper. What follows separates three things: what this book verified, what it did not, and what the law would require if the same project were proposed today. The third part is where the marks are, because it is the part that shows a knowledge of law rather than of history.

What this book could not verify

There is said to be a decision of the High Court of Kerala of about 1980 on the Silent Valley project. The full text of that decision could not be obtained from any source available for this book, under any spelling of the case name that was tried.

Therefore this book states no holding, no citation and no reasoning for it. A student should do the same. An invented holding attributed to a court is a serious error; saying that the outcome was administrative rather than judicial is not.

The episode, in outline

The Silent Valley is an area of tropical evergreen forest in the Palakkad district of Kerala, in the Western Ghats. A hydroelectric project on the Kunthipuzha river within it was proposed and approved, and it was opposed through the late 1970s and early 1980s by scientists, writers and citizens' organisations, with the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad prominent among them. The Government of India eventually decided that the project should not proceed, and the area was constituted a national park.

This outline is given as the commonly stated account. This book has not verified it against a primary document, and a student who repeats it should present it as the background to the legal question, not as a proposition of law.

What made the valley the subject of the argument. It is an unusually undisturbed block of tropical evergreen forest, with a high proportion of species found only in the Western Ghats, and the Western Ghats are one of the internationally recognised biodiversity hotspots, as the Supreme Court itself recorded in K.M. Chinnappa v. Union of India (2002) 10 SCC 606 when it described the forests around Kudremukh as among the eighteen hotspots.

Why the episode matters legally

One: it happened before the law existed. There was no Environment (Protection) Act until 1986 and no environmental clearance notification until 1994, replaced in 2006. There was no Biological Diversity Act until 2002. There was no legal machinery by which the ecological value of the valley could be weighed against the electricity, so the decision had to be taken as a matter of policy, at the highest level of Government.