Supreme Court rulings on environmental damage highlight flaws in National Green Tribunal’s methods

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Companies facing charges of harming the environment have found relief in recent Supreme Court rulings which clarified that the National Green Tribunal (NGT) cannot impose penalties on firms based on their total revenue or solely on the recommendations of expert committees.

In two separate rulings by a bench of Justice BR Gavai and Justice KV Viswanathan on 27 November, the Supreme Court set aside the NGT’s penalties against Grasim Industries Limited and Bezno Chem Industrial Private Limited for alleged environmental violations. The court pulled up the NGT for imposing fines based solely on expert committee reports and calculating them as a percentage of total revenue, without following the principle of natural justice.

Also read: Fashion is going green, but the journey is slow “In any case, the generation of revenue would have no nexus with the amount of penalty to be ascertained for environmental damages. It is further to be noted that the learned NGT found the appellant to be guilty of violations; the least that was expected from the NGT is to give a notice to the appellant before imposing such a heavy penalty," the bench said in its decision to quash the NGT order against Bezno Chem.

“With deep anguish, we have to say that the methodology adopted by the learned NGT for imposing penalties is totally unknown to the principles of law," it added. While quashing the NGT ruling against Grasim Industries, the court said, “The procedure followed by the learned NGT was totally unknown to the settled principles of natural justice… The NGT is a tribunal constituted under the National Green Tribunal Act of 2010.