Intergenerational Equity, and the Duty to People Who Do Not Exist Yet

Held. The Supreme Court held the approvals vitiated, as contrary to the public interest in preserving forest wealth and to considerations of sustainable growth and inter-generational equity, which it defined as the concern for the generations to come: the present generation has no right to imperil the safety and well-being of the next generation or the generations to come thereafter, and no right to deplete all the existing forests and leave nothing for them. It set aside the High Court's judgment, froze the proposed units, directed an expert survey of the khair available, and barred approval of any new katha unit until the State had decided on it.

Why it matters. It is the clearest Indian application of the principle, and it shows the principle at work on a renewable resource: the Court did not forbid the industry, it made the number of units wait on a proper measure of what the forests could supply.

Facts. In Intellectuals Forum, Tirupathi v. State of Andhra Pradesh, AIR 2006 SC 1350, two ancient water tanks at Tirupati were being built over under State housing schemes.

Held. The Court held that the State holds such resources on the public trust doctrine, that the doctrine and the principle of intergenerational equity require their preservation, but it refused to order the complete restoration of the tanks, let the construction already made stand, and directed that the Expert Committee's report be implemented to protect what remained.

Why it matters here. It joins the two doctrines explicitly, which is what an examiner is looking for.

Facts. In M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 280, the transmission lines associated with renewable energy projects in Rajasthan and Gujarat threatened the Great Indian Bustard, and the Court had earlier directed lines to be laid underground.

Held. The Court modified its earlier direction and, in doing so, held that there is a right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change, derived from Article 21 and Article 14 read with Article 48A and Article 51A(g), and it constituted an expert committee to balance conservation with the transition to renewable energy.

Why it matters here. It is the most recent and most explicit judicial statement of an obligation running to future generations, and it shows the principle being applied where both sides of the case are environmental.

Worked example

A State proposes to allot groundwater rights for a bottling plant in a district where the water table has fallen eleven metres in fifteen years. The allotment is for twenty years and is within the State's powers.

The present generation's case. The plant will employ four hundred people and pay for a district's development. Nobody alive is being deprived, because the water table will support extraction for the term.

The intergenerational argument. The aquifer is not being used, it is being consumed. What is taken is not replaced, so the term of the licence is being funded from a stock rather than from a flow, and the people who will live in the district in 2060 will inherit a district without water.

How a court will use it. Not by refusing the allotment because of an abstract duty. It will ask whether the recharge rate was assessed, whether the withdrawal is within it, and whether the allotment was made on that material. Where it was not, the allotment fails, and the reason given will be intergenerational equity.

Which is the honest description of what happened. The principle supplies the reason for a procedural requirement: that a decision consuming a stock must be taken on evidence about the stock.

What it does NOT mean

It does not mean no resource may be used. It means a renewable resource may not be consumed faster than it renews, and a non-renewable resource may not be exhausted without providing a substitute or a benefit that outlasts it.

It does not create an enforceable right in an unborn person. It creates a duty in the present generation, enforced by living persons and by courts.

It does not mean the future counts equally. Economists discount future costs; the principle disputes the rate rather than the practice, and Indian judgments have not engaged with the arithmetic at all.

Limits and criticism

It is indeterminate. How many generations? At what rate? Ganesh Wood Products gives no formula and neither does any other judgment.

It has no claimant. In practice a present person asserts it, and courts have not been troubled by that. The theoretical objection remains.

It can be used against the poor. A principle that limits present consumption falls hardest on people whose present consumption is already inadequate. The Indian formulation of sustainable development answers this by including poverty eradication among its features, which is a real and characteristically Indian qualification.

It duplicates the public trust doctrine. In most Indian judgments the two are cited together and the intergenerational argument adds nothing operative to the trust argument. That is a fair criticism of the case law, not of the idea.

Quick revision

• Each generation holds the environment in trust for those that follow.
• Sources: Stockholm Principle 2, Rio Principle 3, the Brundtland definition, Articles 48A, 51A(g) and 21.
• Ganesh Wood Products (1995): approvals for katha units granted without assessing the khair available held vitiated on this principle, and new units barred pending an expert survey.
• Intellectuals Forum (2006): joins intergenerational equity to the public trust doctrine over the Tirupati tanks.
• Ranjitsinh (2024): the right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change.
• Criticisms: indeterminate, no claimant, may burden the poor, largely duplicates the trust doctrine.

Test yourself

1. Who is the beneficiary of intergenerational equity, and how can a duty be owed to somebody who does not exist? The beneficiary is the succeeding generation, which has no legal personality and cannot sue. The law's answer is the trust: property may be held for a beneficiary who cannot act, and the duty binds the trustee whether or not the beneficiary can enforce it. In India the duty is imposed on the present generation and on the State by Articles 48A and 51A(g) and by the public trust doctrine, and it is enforced by living persons and by courts on the beneficiary's behalf.

2. What did Ganesh Wood Products decide, and why is it the standard illustration? That approvals for katha manufacturing units, which consume khair trees, were vitiated because they had been granted without any proper assessment of how much khair the forests could supply, and that the present generation has no right to imperil the safety and well-being of the next generation or to deplete all the existing forests and leave nothing for it; no new unit was to be approved until an expert survey had been made. It is the standard illustration because the resource is renewable and its supply can be measured, so the principle yields a workable rule: assess first, then license only what the resource can bear.

3. What is the Indian qualification of the principle, and why does it matter? That poverty eradication is one of the features of sustainable development. It matters because a principle limiting present consumption in the interest of the future falls most heavily on people whose present consumption is already below subsistence, and an unqualified version of it would require the poorest to bear the cost of a duty owed by everybody. The Indian formulation, from Stockholm onwards, has insisted that development and the environment are pursued together rather than one at the expense of the other.