Public Opinion, and Its Significance in Environment Protection
Chapter One Hundred Seventy-One
Syllabus topic 6, "Emerging Legal Controls"
Pages 833 to 838 of 913
In one line
Public participation is a procedure the law provides; public opinion is a force the law responds to, and in India the second has done more work than the first.
MU sets this on three papers, twice pairing the two words: "Public opinion and participation in environment protection", "Importance of public opinion and participation", and "Discuss the significance of Public Opinion and Public Participation." The examiner wants the distinction and then the significance of each.
The distinction
| Public participation | Public opinion | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | a right to be heard in a defined proceeding | the state of what people think and are prepared to do about it |
| Where it lives | rule 5(3) of the Rules of 1986; stage 3 of the notification of 2006 | nowhere in any instrument |
| Who may use it | a person invited or entitled at that stage | anybody |
| When | at the moment the procedure allows | at any time |
| Its output | a record the decision maker must consider | pressure, litigation, elections and, eventually, legislation |
| Its limit | the procedure's own exclusions and timetable | it may be wrong, and it may be absent |
The most useful way to put it in an answer. Participation is a legal right exercisable at a moment. Opinion is a political fact operating continuously. A country with strong participation rights and no public opinion has empty hearings; a country with strong opinion and no participation rights has litigation and agitation instead of a process. India has more of the second than the first.
What public opinion has actually done in India
It supplied the litigants. Almost every leading case in Indian environmental law began with somebody outside the Government deciding that something was wrong.
Facts. In Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of Uttar Pradesh, AIR 1985 SC 652, (1985) 2 SCC 431, a letter from a voluntary organisation about unauthorised and unsafe limestone quarrying in the Dehradun and Mussoorie hills was treated as a writ petition under Article 32, and the Court appointed the Bhargava Committee to inspect the quarries, a Working Group set up by the Government of India also reporting on them. Held. The Court directed that the quarries in the Sahasradhara block and others found dangerous be closed forthwith, allowed a further category to work, and referred another to a further expert committee; it recognised that closure would cause hardship to the lessees but held that this was a price that had to be paid for protecting and safeguarding the right of the people to live in a healthy environment with minimal disturbance of the ecological balance. Why it matters here. It is the first Indian case in which the Supreme Court closed an industry on purely environmental grounds, and it began with a letter.
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