Development not at cost of health, environment, says SC

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has ruled that development isn't an absolute goal and that the right to a clean environment, which is part of the right to life, cannot be traded off with economic benefits.

Declining permission for change of land for a cement factory to come up at Sangrur, Punjab, close to farms and a school, a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta also quashed Central Pollution Control Board's revised industrial sector categorisation issued in Jan 2025, in which a "stand-alone grinding unit without captive power plant" was put in 'orange' category from 'red', allowing these near inhabited areas.

Writing the judgment, Justice Nath said, "Economic development and industrial growth are legitimate and important objectives... However, in a constitutional framework founded on rule of law, development isn't an abstract or absolute goal. It's conditioned by the non-derogable obligation to protect life, health and environmental integrity."

"Development that undermines these foundational values ceases to be constitutionally permissible development. When developmental activity poses a credible risk to human health or environmental safety, regulatory frameworks must err on the side of protection," he said.

The Supreme Court said the Constitution does not permit a trade-off where civilian life and health are exposed to foreseeable harm on the assumption that economic benefit or industrial facilitation justifies such exposure.

"Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India do not tolerate a regulatory calculus that treats environmental safety as negotiable," it said.

Faulting the reclassification of industries and the dilution of the restrictions on locations without considering their proximity to habitation and ill-effect on environment, Justices Nath and Mehra said, "Sector-level reclassification, divorced from exposure realities and local sensitivities, would become a ready instrument to justify siting of polluting activities near habitations, schools, and other sensitive receptors."

"Such an approach would not remain confined to the present case. It would operate as a precedent, enabling progressive erosion of preventive safeguards across regions, with cumulative and irreversible consequences. The law does not permit environmental protection to be weakened incrementally until harm becomes inevitable," the bench said.

It said environmental degradation is mostly irreversible. "A regulatory framework that allows risk to materialise first and seeks to address consequences later is fundamentally incompatible with constitutional environmental jurisprudence," it said. It said courts are slow to interfere with the developmental and economic activities of the state.

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