Emerging Issues and Challenges in Environmental Information

In one line

The problem with environmental information in India is no longer scarcity but shape: there is a great deal of data on portals, very little of it is usable, and the rules that create it were written before continuous monitoring existed.

MU set this in 2024 in terms: "What emerging issues and challenges with respect to environmental information do you see in India?" The word emerging asks for the present, not for a history of the Right to Information Act. Six issues, each with what the law does and does not provide.

Issue one, continuous monitoring data has no legal home

What changed. Consented industries in India increasingly operate online continuous emission and effluent monitoring systems, which transmit readings to a Board's server without a human step. The data exists in a quantity no annual return can hold.

What the law provides. Nothing addressed to it. Rule 14 of the Environment (Protection) Rules 1986 requires an annual environmental statement in Form V by 30 September. Paragraph 10 of the notification of 2006 requires half-yearly compliance reports on 1 June and 1 December. Both were written for a world in which a unit reported what it had measured.

The questions nobody has answered. Is the transmitted data information under section 2(f) of the Right to Information Act 2005 held by the Board? Almost certainly yes. Must the Board publish it under section 4? The section requires publication of specified categories, and a stream of readings is not among them. Is a reading admissible against the unit, and against what standard, when a standard is expressed as a limit and a stream produces exceedances? And what does a gap in the stream mean?

Why it is the first issue. Every other issue below is easier if this one is solved, because continuous data makes compliance visible without an inspection.

Issue two, portals that publish everything and disclose nothing

What has been built. The clearance regime has a portal. The waste rules run on portals for registration, targets and certificates. The Ecomark Rules require a portal under rule 11 on which the Board must publish holders, products and the report on which each grant was made. The plastic, e-waste and battery rules all run their producer responsibility markets on one.

The problem. A portal is a filing system, not a disclosure. Data placed on it as an image, without a search, without a download and without a stable identifier for a unit, satisfies a publication duty and answers no question. Nobody can ask, from a portal designed that way, how many units in a district exceeded a standard, or which producer bought certificates from which recycler.

What the law would need to say. That published environmental information be machine-readable, downloadable in bulk, and keyed to a persistent identifier for the establishment. No Indian environmental instrument says any of that.