LLM Group 6 Environment and Legal Order Environment and Development Law and Policy 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

The frame: understanding, respect and practice are three different things

Indian writing about the natural world spans more than two thousand years and many traditions, and it does not speak with one voice. The useful way to organise it is by function. Some texts tell a person what nature IS: these are the cosmological and devotional texts. Some tell a person or an officer what may and may not be DONE to it: these are the law books, the treatise on statecraft and the royal edicts. And some of the most important material is not written at all but survives as PRACTICE, in groves, tanks, dietary rules and community resistance.

Keeping the three apart matters for a lawyer. An ethic of reverence is not a legal duty, and a legal duty on paper is not evidence that anything was protected. A strong answer shows all three and does not assume that the first produced the third.

The law books carried the same understanding into their account of living things. The Manusmriti, in Buhler's translation, says in Book I verse 49 that plants "possess internal consciousness and experience pleasure and pain". The Buddhist monastic code made that belief operative: Pacittiya 11 of the Vinaya makes it an offence for a monk to destroy a living plant, which the rule calls bhutagama, the home of a being. Across these traditions, the environment was understood as alive and as a moral community, not as inert matter.

The medieval centuries added a different kind of understanding, observational rather than sacred. The Mughal emperor Jahangir's memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, records close observation of animals and birds, the sarus crane among them, and his court painter Ustad Mansur painted flora and fauna with a naturalist's accuracy. Nature here is something to be studied and recorded, which is the beginning of the scientific idea of environment.

How it was respected: duties, prohibitions and graded penalties in the writings

Respect became rule in three bodies of writing, and each should be quoted.

Ashoka's edicts (Dhammika's translation) respected the environment by public proclamation. Rock Edict I forbids animal sacrifice and records that the royal kitchen, where "hundreds of thousands of animals were killed every day", now kills two peacocks and a deer. Pillar Edict V, issued "twenty-six years after my coronation", lists protected species ending with "all four-footed creatures that are neither useful nor edible", and orders that "forests are not to be burnt either without reason or to kill creatures". Pillar Edict VII records banyan trees planted "so that they can give shade to animals and men", mango groves, and wells and watering places "for the use of animals and men".

The Manusmriti protected water and trees. Book IV verse 56: "Let him not throw urine or faeces into the water, nor saliva... nor blood, nor poisonous things." Book VIII verse 285: "According to the usefulness of the several (kinds of) trees a fine must be inflicted for injuring them." Book IX verses 279 and 281 punish breaking the dam of a tank and taking away the water of an ancient tank.

How it was practised: institutions that outlived the texts

The strongest evidence that the idea was more than rhetoric is in practice. Sacred groves, the devrai of Maharashtra, the kavu of Kerala, the orans of Rajasthan and the sarna of Chotanagpur, are patches of forest dedicated to a deity in which felling is forbidden by community observance. They are protected areas without a statute, and many are now the only surviving remnants of the original vegetation around them.

The Bishnoi community of Rajasthan practised the protection of the khejri tree and of wild animals as religious duty. In 1730 at Khejarli near Jodhpur, three hundred and sixty-three Bishnois, led by Amrita Devi and her daughters, were killed resisting the felling of khejri trees ordered for the Maharaja's construction. The episode is the clearest instance of respect carried to sacrifice, and it is the ancestor of the Chipko resistance of the 1970s.

In Fomento Resorts and Hotels Ltd v. Minguel Martins, (2009) 3 SCC 571, a hotel on Goa's Vainguinim beach had blocked the public's traditional access. The Court began its account of the public trust doctrine with the observation that "Sages and Saints of India lived in forests. Their preachings contained in Vedas, Upanishadas, Smritis etc. are ample evidence of the society's respect for plants, trees, earth, sky, air, water and every form of life", and then held that natural resources are held by the State as trustee "on behalf of the people and especially the future generations". The ancient respect became the foundation of a modern doctrine, and the beach access was ordered open.

In T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India, (2012) 4 SCC 362, a case on the protection of sandalwood and red sanders as specified plants, the Court applied an ecocentric approach and said the principle "had its roots in India, much before it was thought of in the Western world", citing the Isha Upanishad. A careful answer adds that the sentence the Court placed in quotation marks is its own paraphrase of Upanishadic teaching, not a translation of a verse.

First, reverence was not enforcement. We have the texts and the inscriptions but not the prosecutions, so we do not know how far the Arthashastra's fines or Ashoka's prohibitions were applied. Second, protection was often a by-product of privilege or revenue: elephants were protected because they were weapons of war, and royal hunting reserves protected game for the king. Third, the tradition is not one voice: Vedic ritual required animal sacrifice that Ashoka's first edict forbade, and the Dharmashastra graded penalties by the status of the offender. Fourth, veneration has not prevented degradation: rivers held sacred are among the most polluted in the country.

The law now draws the same line. In Animal Welfare Board of India v. Union of India, decided by a Constitution Bench on 18 May 2023, the Court upheld State amendments regulating jallikattu as part of Tamil Nadu's cultural heritage, but held that "if such cultural event or tradition offends the law, the penal consequence would follow. Such activities cannot be justified on the ground of being part of cultural tradition of a State." Tradition informs environmental law. It does not override it.