Enforcing a Tribunal Order, and the Rest of the Act

In one line

Disobeying the Tribunal costs a person three years or ten crore rupees and a company twenty-five crore, and yet every offence under the Act is non-cognizable and needs a complaint.

In the wording a student can write in an examination: section 26 of the National Green Tribunal Act 2010 punishes failure to comply with an order, award or decision of the Tribunal; section 27 provides for offences by companies and section 28 for offences by a Department of the Government; section 29 bars the jurisdiction of civil courts; section 30 requires a complaint by the Central Government or by a person who has given sixty days' notice, and confines trial to a court not inferior to a Metropolitan Magistrate or Judicial Magistrate of the first class; sections 31 to 33 make the members and staff public servants, protect good faith action and give the Act overriding effect; and section 38 repeals the National Environment Tribunal Act 1995 and the National Environment Appellate Authority Act 1997.

Section 26, the penalty

Sub-section (2), and it is the provision that undercuts the rest. Notwithstanding anything in the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973, every offence under this Act shall be deemed to be non-cognizable.

What that means. The police may not register a case or arrest without a warrant. Prosecution can begin only on a complaint, and section 30 then says whose complaint. So the largest fine in Indian environmental law is attached to an offence that no police officer can act on.

Why the figures are so large. They are aimed at a corporate defendant for whom a lakh is a rounding error, and twenty five crore rupees for a company, with a lakh a day thereafter, is intended to make disobedience of a Tribunal order more expensive than compliance. The comparison to draw is with section 15 of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, where the maximum penalty is fifteen lakh rupees. The Tribunal's order is protected far more heavily than the substantive law it enforces.

Sections 27 and 28, companies and departments

Section 27, companies. Every person directly in charge of, and responsible to, the company for the conduct of its business at the time of the offence, as well as the company, is deemed guilty, with the defence of want of knowledge or all due diligence. And any director, manager, secretary or other officer with whose consent or connivance, or by whose neglect, the offence was committed, is also deemed guilty. Company means any body corporate and includes a firm or other association of individuals; director, in relation to a firm, means a partner.