LLM Group 6 Environment and Legal Order Environment and Development Law and Policy 2018 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: a REVIEW surveys a body of writing and then judges it. The clearest way to survey these writings is by THEME rather than by text, because the same concerns recur across Vedic hymns, the Arthashastra, the law books, Ashoka's edicts and medieval religious and courtly writing: the earth and the elements, forests and trees, animals, water and sanitation, plants as living beings, and the ruler's duty. Give each theme its texts with accurate references, and then review critically: what the writings achieved, where they fall short, and how reliably modern courts have used them. "Brief" limits the detail on each text, not the range of the answer.

The protective idea in this theme is restraint and restoration: take from the earth, but let what is taken grow back.

Theme two: forests and trees

Forests are treated in three ways. The Arthashastra (Shamasastry's translation) classifies them by function in Book II, Chapter 2: forests for ascetics, a walled forest for the king, "another game-forest with game-beasts; open to all", forests "specially reserved" for produce and elephant forests at the frontier, all under a superintendent with forest guards. It protects individual trees by graded fines in Book III, Chapter 19, rising from six panas for cutting the tender sprouts of fruit, flower or shade trees in city parks to the middle amercement for felling them, and doubled for boundary trees, trees that are worshipped and trees in the king's forests.

The Manusmriti (Buhler's translation) states the principle behind such fines: "According to the usefulness of the several (kinds of) trees a fine must be inflicted for injuring them; that is the settled rule" (VIII.285). And the medieval Bishnoi code turned tree protection into religious law: Guru Jambheshwar, founding the community at Samrathal Dhora in 1485, forbade the felling of green trees, a rule the community upheld at Khejarli in 1730 when 363 of its members died defending khejri trees.

Theme four: water and sanitation

The law books protect water sources from pollution and damage. The Manusmriti forbids throwing "urine or faeces into the water, nor saliva, nor (clothes) defiled by impure substances, nor any other (impurity), nor blood, nor poisonous things" (IV.56), and punishes with death, or with repair and the highest amercement, whoever breaks the dam of a tank (IX.279). The Arthashastra fines "Whoever throws dirt in the street" and those who foul reservoirs of water and places of pilgrimage (Book II, Chapter 36). In the medieval period Firoz Shah Tughlaq cut canals from the Yamuna and the Sutlej to supply his new city of Hisar, water engineering on a scale that anticipates modern irrigation.

Theme five: the ruler's duty

Across these writings protection is the ruler's responsibility. The Arthashastra creates officials, the superintendent of forests and the superintendent of forest produce, the latter charged to "fix adequate fines and compensations to be levied from those who cause any damage to productive forests" (Book II, Chapter 17). Ashoka's seventh Pillar Edict records the ruler's positive works: banyan trees planted along roads "so that they can give shade to animals and men", mango groves, wells "at intervals of eight krosas" and watering places "for the use of animals and men". The Mughal emperor Jahangir, whose memoir the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri records close observation of birds and animals, represents a different royal relationship with nature, that of the patron of its study.

Where they fall short. First, they give duties, not rights: no subject could compel a ruler to protect a forest. Second, much of the protection served other ends: elephants were protected as instruments of war, royal forests for hunting, and trees "according to the usefulness" of each. Third, the law books graded obligations and penalties by caste and status, which makes them an unequal model. Fourth, the traditions contradict one another, since Vedic sacrifice is exactly what Ashoka's first edict forbade. Fifth, we have the texts but little evidence of their enforcement.

The use of tradition has also been contested in the law itself. A Constitution Bench in Animal Welfare Board of India v. Union of India, decided on 18 May 2023, upheld the State amendments that permitted jallikattu, bullock-cart races and kambala under conditions, rejecting Nagaraja's view that jallikattu is not part of Tamil Nadu's cultural heritage while directing strict enforcement of the safeguards by District Magistrates. And in Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of U.P., AIR 1988 SC 2187, where the Court relied on the Vedic reverence for forests while bringing limestone mining in the Doon valley to an end, it quoted as "Artharva Veda (5.30.6)" a verse beginning "Man's paradise is on earth", a rendering a student should cite as the Court's quotation rather than as a checked translation.

Conclusion. The ancient and medieval writings of India, reviewed by theme, express a consistent concern for the earth and elements, forests and trees, animals, water and sanitation, plants as living beings, and the ruler's duty to protect and provide. They anticipated protected areas, graded penalties, compensation for damage and public works for shade and water, and in the Bishnoi code produced a rule that a community defended with its life. Their limits are as clear: they imposed duties without rights, often protected nature for its usefulness to power, applied unequally, and left little record of enforcement. Their value today is as a moral and cultural foundation for modern law, used by the courts to explain why environmental harm is a public wrong, provided that the texts are quoted as they are and not as later paraphrase, and that tradition is treated, as the 2023 jallikattu judgment treats it, as subject to the law.