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Informist, Friday, Nov. 21, 2025

NEW DELHI – Observing that right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution includes the right to a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment, the Supreme Court Friday formed a high-powered committee for the restoration and rejuvenation of Jojari, Luni, and Bandi rivers in Rajasthan. The top court was hearing a suo moto case on alarming levels of industrial pollution, governance failures, and severe public health consequences affecting millions of residents across several districts of Rajasthan due to "grave environmental catastrophe" in the three rivers.

"What emerges from the record is not an isolated incident nor an accidental oversight, but a sustained, systemic collapse of regulatory vigilance and utter administrative apathy stretching over nearly two decades," said a bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta. The pollution of the aforementioned riverine ecosystem represents an assault not merely on natural watercourses but on the constitutional guarantees that animate and sustain the Indian Republic, which is the right to life, dignity, health, safe drinking water, ecological balance, equality, and the right of future generations to inherit an environment capable of sustaining life, said the bench. When environmental degradation reaches such gargantuan proportions that it strikes at the foundation of these guarantees, the injury transcends the ecological realm and becomes a direct constitutional injury requiring immediate, comprehensive and effective judicial redress, the bench added.

The bench said that it was painful to see that the Rajasthan government took the action only after the Supreme Court admitted the suo moto case in September. The Rajasthan government should have acted spontaneously years ago to ensure round the clock compliances, which is the constitutional obligation of the state and the concerned authorities, said the court. The state government has now "woken up from its slumber" and passed a series of preventive orders only after the top court took cognisance of the issue, said the bench. "The belated flurry of administrative activity, triggered solely by fortuitous judicial intervention, underscores a prolonged period of regulatory apathy and institutional neglect," said the court.

Environmental harm of the present magnitude is not merely a regulatory lapse or administrative shortcoming; it is in gross dereliction of the constitutional promise that the state shall secure conditions of life with dignity, safety and well-being, said the apex court. Polluted rivers, contaminated groundwater, and the resulting impairment of health and livelihood dilute the substance of the right to life as enshrined under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, reducing it from a living guarantee into a fragile abstraction, the court added.

The top court observed that the contamination of the rivers in Rajasthan has caused profound and multi-dimensional harm to the people, ecology and economy of the region. What were once seasonal rivers sustaining agriculture, wildlife, and village life have, over the years, turned into conduits for untreated industrial effluents and municipal sewage, said the court.  End

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Nishant Maher

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