The National Green Tribunal is best understood by starting with what it cannot hear. A dispute about effluent discharged by a factory into a river belongs to it, decided by a bench on which a scientist sits beside a judge. A dispute about the diversion of a tiger reserve, or about felling governed by the forest law of 1927, does not belong to it at all, and must travel instead to a High Court bench with no statutory claim to environmental expertise. That inversion is not an accident of drafting discovered later. It is built into the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 itself, in a schedule that lists seven enactments and omits two of the most consequential environmental statutes in the country. Everything else about the institution, its composition, its remedial powers, its clocks and its appeal route, follows from understanding that the tribunal’s jurisdiction was defined by a list rather than by a subject.

An institution profile has to answer a design question before it answers any other: what was this body built to be able to do, and what structural choices determine what it actually does. For the tribunal the design choices are unusually legible. Parliament gave it original jurisdiction over civil cases raising a substantial question relating to the environment, appellate jurisdiction over a specified set of orders made under the scheduled enactments, power to award compensation and to order restitution of damaged property and of the environment itself, and a statutory instruction to decide by applying three named principles, sustainable development, the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle. Parliament also gave it benches composed in equal numbers of judicial and expert members, limitation periods measured in months rather than years, and an appeal that runs directly to the Supreme Court. Set against those gifts, Parliament withheld the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 and the Indian Forest Act, 1927, the two statutes through which the state governs wildlife and the classical forest estate. The profile that follows is the story of a powerful forum with a schedule-shaped hole in its mandate, and of the consequences that flow from the hole for litigants, for conservation and for the tribunal’s own record.

Why India built a separate environmental forum

The tribunal did not arrive as an isolated invention. It closed a twenty-five year institutional search that began with the Bhopal gas disaster of December 1984, which demonstrated that the ordinary civil courts could not process mass environmental harm at the speed or with the technical apparatus such harm demands, and the legislative lineage that runs from Bhopal through the compensation and insurance statutes to the tribunal is the necessary background to the Act of 2010. Parliament’s first attempt at a specialised forum was the National Environment Tribunal Act, 1995, enacted to provide strict liability compensation for accidents involving hazardous substances through a dedicated tribunal. That statute was never brought into force. No commencement notification issued, no tribunal was constituted under it, and for fifteen years the statute book announced a compensation forum that did not exist, while accident victims relied on the ordinary courts and on the insurance layer created by the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991. The second attempt was the National Environment Appellate Authority Act, 1997, which created an appellate authority with a narrow remit centred on the grant of environmental clearances. That body existed on paper and in a modest office, but it spent long periods without a chairperson, decided little, and acquired a reputation as the weakest link in the clearance system rather than as a check upon it.

The intellectual case for doing better was assembled in the decade before 2010. The Supreme Court, in litigation concerning industrial pollution in Andhra Pradesh decided in 1999 in the case associated with Professor M. V. Nayudu, recorded the difficulty ordinary courts face when a dispute turns on scientific evidence and pointed toward a specialised forum in which legal and scientific members decide together. The Law Commission of India took the proposal up in its 186th Report of 2003, which recommended the constitution of environment courts with both judicial and scientific membership. The tribunal created in 2010 follows that blueprint closely: a national body, mixed membership, original as well as appellate jurisdiction, and a remit extending beyond clearances to pollution disputes and compensation. Understanding the lineage matters because it explains the design’s ambition. The tribunal was not meant to be a slightly faster appellate board. It was meant to be the forum in which Indian environmental law would be adjudicated by people equipped to weigh evidence about aquifers, emission loads and ecological damage, and the two predecessor failures, one statute never commenced and one authority left to wither, are the record against which its own chronic vacancy problem has to be read.

What did the National Environment Appellate Authority actually do?

The authority created in 1997 heard appeals against the grant of environmental clearances in specified areas under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. It had no original jurisdiction over pollution, no compensation powers and no expert bench, and its work was repeatedly interrupted by long vacancies in the chairperson’s office.

The comparison carries a lesson the series has met in other clusters. A specialised body fails in two distinct ways: it can be designed too narrowly to matter, which was the appellate authority’s defect, or it can be designed adequately and then starved of members, which became the tribunal’s recurring problem. The Act of 2010 fixed the first failure completely. The authority’s single-issue appellate remit became one clause among ten heads of appeal, and to it Parliament added original jurisdiction over substantial environmental questions, a compensation and restitution jurisdiction, and benches required to pair judicial with expert members in equal number. Whether the second failure has been fixed is a question of appointments rather than of drafting, and it is taken up in the discussion of benches and capacity below.

The statutory basis: the Act of 2010 and what it repealed

The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 is Act 19 of 2010. It received the assent of the President on 2 June 2010, and the Central Government established the tribunal by notification with effect from 18 October 2010. Its preamble records the design’s international and constitutional sources: the decisions taken at the Stockholm conference of 1972 and at the Rio conference of 1992, at which India participated, and the judicial construction of the right to a healthy environment as part of the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Act’s own statement of purpose is the effective and expeditious disposal of cases relating to environmental protection and conservation of forests and other natural resources, including the enforcement of legal rights relating to the environment and the giving of relief and compensation for damage to persons and property.

Section 3 empowers the Central Government to establish the tribunal by notification. Section 38 then performs the closing of the earlier era: it repeals both the National Environment Tribunal Act, 1995 and the National Environment Appellate Authority Act, 1997, dissolves the appellate authority, vacates its offices, and transfers every case pending before it to the tribunal, to be disposed of as if filed under the new Act. The repeal of the 1995 Act deserves emphasis because the statute being repealed had never operated for a single day. Parliament was not replacing a working institution; it was clearing away a dead letter and a failing one in the same subsection, and enacting the working version of the idea fifteen years after the idea was first legislated. That history is why the tribunal’s commencement was not staged or deferred: the Act was brought into force and the tribunal established within months of assent, a contrast with the staged commencements that mark so many Indian statutes.

The Act is organised in five chapters and carries three schedules. Chapter one contains the definitions, including the definition of a substantial question relating to the environment on which the original jurisdiction turns. Chapter two establishes the tribunal and governs its composition, qualifications, appointment, tenure and removal. Chapter three, the working heart, contains the jurisdiction, the relief provisions, the procedure and the appeal. Chapter four contains the penalty provisions, and chapter five the miscellaneous provisions, including the bar on civil courts, the overriding effect, the power to amend Schedule I and the repeal. Schedule I lists the seven enactments that define the jurisdiction. Schedule II lists the heads under which compensation or relief may be claimed, running from death and disability through damage to property, loss of business, harm to flora and fauna, and the cost of restoring the environment. Schedule III amends the scheduled enactments themselves, principally to route their appeals to the tribunal from the date of its establishment.

Composition: the expert member as the distinctive feature

Section 4 fixes the tribunal’s composition, and its numbers should be stated exactly because they are often misstated. The tribunal consists of a full time Chairperson, not less than ten and not more than twenty full time Judicial Members, and not less than ten and not more than twenty full time Expert Members, the strength within each band being what the Central Government notifies. The Act therefore sets a floor and a ceiling rather than a fixed establishment, and the choice of operating strength sits with the executive that is also the tribunal’s most frequent respondent, a structural fact that returns in the capacity discussion. Section 4 also empowers the Chairperson to invite a person with specialised knowledge and experience in a particular case to assist the tribunal in that case, and empowers the Central Government, in consultation with the Chairperson, to make rules on the tribunal’s practice and procedure, including circuit sittings away from a bench’s ordinary place and the minimum number of members who shall hear each class of case. The rules carry one requirement of genuine constitutional interest for the institution: the number of Expert Members hearing an application or appeal must equal the number of Judicial Members hearing it. Parity is not a convention. It is written into the rule-making clause of the composition section itself.

How many members does the National Green Tribunal have?

The Act authorises a full time Chairperson with between ten and twenty full time Judicial Members and between ten and twenty full time Expert Members, the precise strength within each band being notified by the Central Government. A hearing bench must include equal numbers of judicial and expert members, so the tribunal’s effective capacity depends on both categories being filled.

The qualifications in section 5 divide along the same two tracks. The Chairperson and the Judicial Members must be, or have been, judges of the Supreme Court or Chief Justices of a High Court, and a person who is or has been a judge of a High Court is also qualified to sit as a Judicial Member. The Expert Member track is the innovation. An Expert Member must hold a master’s degree in the physical or life sciences with a doctorate, or a master’s degree in engineering or technology, together with fifteen years of experience in the relevant field including five years of practical experience in fields the section names, among them pollution control, hazardous substance management, environment impact assessment, climate change management, biological diversity management and forest conservation, in a reputed national level institution. The alternative route is administrative: fifteen years of administrative experience including five years of dealing with environmental matters in the Central Government, a State Government or a reputed national or state level institution. Appointments are made by the Central Government, the Chairperson in consultation with the Chief Justice of India, and the members on the recommendation of a selection committee constituted under the rules.

Tenure as enacted was a single term of five years with no eligibility for reappointment, subject to age ceilings of seventy years for a Chairperson or member drawn from the Supreme Court, sixty-seven for one drawn from a High Court chief justiceship or judgeship, and sixty-five for an Expert Member. Removal protections follow the familiar tribunal pattern, with removal of the Chairperson or a Judicial Member only after an inquiry by a sitting judge of the Supreme Court. The tenure and appointment conditions were then pulled into the general tribunal reform project, culminating in the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021, which substituted a four-year term, a minimum appointment age of fifty years and a search-cum-selection committee structure across the tribunal system. In November 2025 the Supreme Court struck down the core of that settlement, holding the four-year tenure and the fifty-year floor unconstitutional and directing the Union to establish a National Tribunals Commission, with the result that the appointment framework for the tribunal rests on the Court’s earlier jurisprudence rather than on the 2021 text. What the reforms never touched is the composition band in section 4. The ten to twenty structure, and the parity rule, have survived every round of general tribunal legislation.

The National Green Tribunal’s jurisdiction: a schedule, not a subject

Section 14 confers the tribunal’s original jurisdiction in a single sentence whose structure controls everything that follows. The tribunal has jurisdiction over all civil cases where a substantial question relating to the environment, including the enforcement of any legal right relating to the environment, is involved, and the question arises out of the implementation of the enactments specified in Schedule I. Two conditions must both be satisfied. The case must raise a substantial question relating to the environment, and that question must arise from the implementation of one of the seven scheduled enactments. A grievance can be profoundly environmental and still fail the second condition, which is where most mistaken filings begin.

The phrase substantial question is defined in section 2(m), and the definition is narrower than public discussion assumes. A question qualifies where there is a direct violation of a specific statutory environmental obligation, by which the community at large, rather than an individual or a group of individuals, is affected or is likely to be affected by the environmental consequences, or the gravity of damage to the environment or property is substantial, or the damage to public health is broadly measurable. It also qualifies where the environmental consequences relate to a specific activity or a point source of pollution. The definition is doing gatekeeping work. It excludes the purely private nuisance dispute between neighbours, which remains with the civil courts, and it anchors the tribunal’s docket to violations of statutory obligations under the scheduled Acts rather than to environmental harm at large. The jurisprudence on the meaning of the phrase matters for the same reason: what counts as substantial decides what the tribunal will admit at all, and the tribunal’s benches have had to work out, case by case, how the community-impact limb applies to harms that begin with one village, one aquifer or one stretch of coastline.

Schedule I, as enacted, lists seven enactments, and they should be named exactly as scheduled. They are the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974; the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Cess Act, 1977; the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980; the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981; the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991; and the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. The selection has a logic. It gathers the pollution control quartet of water, cess, air and the umbrella statute, the forest conservation statute that governs diversion of forest land to non-forest purposes, the insurance statute born of Bhopal, and the biodiversity statute. Two features deserve notice. The cess statute of 1977 has since been repealed in the goods and services tax settlement, so the schedule’s second entry is a survival rather than a living remit. And the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 is present, which means the clearance side of forest governance is inside the tribunal while the forest statute of 1927 is outside it, a distinction that decides real cases and bewilders real litigants.

Section 34 completes the architecture. The Central Government may, by notification, amend Schedule I by adding any other Act of Parliament having regard to the objective of environmental protection and conservation of natural resources, or by omitting an entry, with the draft notification laid before each House of Parliament for a total period of thirty days and liable to disapproval or modification by both Houses. The schedule-shaped hole was therefore never structurally permanent. It could have been closed at any time by executive notification subject to parliamentary oversight. That it has not been closed is a policy fact about successive governments, not a defect in the statute’s machinery, and it sharpens the article’s central question: why the two statutes most associated with wildlife and forests in the public mind were left out, and then left out again every year the notification power went unused.

The centrepiece: wildlife and the Indian Forest Act are outside

The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 is the statute under which national parks and sanctuaries are declared, hunting and trade in wild animals and their articles are prohibited, and the protection of species is organised. The Indian Forest Act, 1927 is the colonial statute under which reserved and protected forests are constituted and forest offences are defined. Neither appears in Schedule I. The consequence is stark. A dispute about a factory’s effluent goes to a bench with expert members. A dispute about poaching enforcement, about the boundaries of a sanctuary, about a mining lease inside a tiger reserve insofar as the question arises under the wildlife statute, or about the rights and offences governed by the 1927 Act, does not come to the tribunal at all. The litigant’s route is the constitutional one: a writ petition to the High Court under Article 226, or in an appropriate case to the Supreme Court under Article 32, before benches that may be distinguished but carry no statutory entitlement to sit with scientific members.

The practical map is worth stating precisely, because the confusion is widespread and consequential. A challenge to a forest clearance, meaning the Central Government’s approval under section 2 of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 for diversion of forest land, is an appeal the tribunal can hear, because that statute is scheduled. A challenge to the same project’s effect on a protected area, framed under the wildlife statute, belongs to the High Court. One project, two forums, divided by the schedule rather than by the nature of the harm. The Wildlife Protection Act’s own scheme and litigation history belong to that statute’s article; the institution point here is that the tribunal’s exclusion from it was a legislative choice, made when both statutes were mature and prominent, and never publicly explained in the passage record.

Can the tribunal add the Wildlife Act to its own schedule?

No. Only the Central Government can amend Schedule I, by notification under section 34, and the draft notification must be laid before each House of Parliament for thirty days, during which both Houses may disapprove or modify it. The tribunal has no power to extend its own jurisdiction to an unscheduled statute, however environmental the dispute.

Why the exclusion happened is genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty should be recorded rather than filled. Defenders of the design point to the constitutional sensitivity of forests and wildlife, subjects on which the states have their own statutes and administrative machinery, and to the volume of service and settlement litigation under the 1927 Act that a national tribunal could not sensibly absorb. Critics answer that the Forest (Conservation) Act was included despite the same federal sensitivity, that conservation litigation is precisely the field where expert adjudication is scarcest and most needed, and that no ministerial statement in the passage debates supplied a reasoned basis for drawing the line where it was drawn. The article’s verdict on the point is that the exclusion fails on its own terms. Whatever explains the omission of the 1927 Act, whose docket is heavily local and penal, the omission of the wildlife statute leaves the tribunal unable to hear the category of environmental dispute in which scientific assessment of habitat, species and cumulative impact is most decisive. A reform whose stated purpose was expert environmental adjudication left its most expertise-hungry subject to the generalist forum. The table that follows is the findable form of that argument: the reader can see, statute by statute, what is in, what is out, and where the out cases must go.

Statute	In Schedule I	Forum for a dispute under it	Practical meaning for a litigant
Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974	Yes	The tribunal, on application or appeal	Pollution of water, board consents and board directions are the tribunal’s core docket
Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Cess Act, 1977	Yes, as enacted	The tribunal	The cess statute has since been repealed, so this entry is spent
Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980	Yes	The tribunal, on appeal against diversion approvals	Forest clearance decisions can be challenged before expert members
Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981	Yes	The tribunal, on application or appeal	Air pollution disputes and board appellate orders come to the tribunal
Environment (Protection) Act, 1986	Yes	The tribunal, on application or appeal	Clearance grants and refusals, and section 5 directions, are appealable to the tribunal
Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991	Yes	The tribunal	Accident compensation claims connect with the insurance layer through the tribunal
Biological Diversity Act, 2002	Yes	The tribunal, on appeal	Benefit-sharing determinations of the biodiversity authorities are appealable to the tribunal
Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972	No	The High Court, by writ petition	Wildlife and protected-area disputes receive no expert bench, however scientific the question
Indian Forest Act, 1927	No	The High Court, by writ petition, and the ordinary courts	Reserved forest, offence and settlement questions stay with the generalist forums

Relief, compensation and the power to restore

Section 15 gives the tribunal its remedial triad. By order it may provide relief and compensation to the victims of pollution and other environmental damage arising under the scheduled enactments, including accidents occurring while handling hazardous substances; it may order restitution of property damaged; and it may order restitution of the environment for such area or areas as it thinks fit. The third limb is the far-reaching one. Compensation looks backward to a victim’s loss. Restitution of the environment looks at the damaged river stretch, aquifer or coastline itself, and empowers the tribunal to direct that the environment be restored, at the cost of the person responsible. The relief under section 15 is expressly in addition to the relief paid or payable under the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991, so the insurance layer and the tribunal layer accumulate rather than substitute for each other. Where compensation is ordered for damage to the environment, section 24 routes the money through the authority under the Public Liability Insurance Act for credit to the Environmental Relief Fund, from which it may be used for environmental purposes as prescribed, a design meant to stop compensation for a public harm from dissolving into a private windfall or an unspent deposit.

Section 17 supplies the liability rules that drive section 15. Where death, injury or damage to property or the environment results from an accident, or from the adverse impact of an activity, operation or process under a scheduled enactment, the person responsible is liable to pay relief or compensation under the heads in Schedule II as the tribunal determines. Where the harm is the combined or resultant effect of several activities, the tribunal may apportion liability among those responsible on an equitable basis. For accidents, the tribunal applies the principle of no fault: the claimant does not have to prove negligence, which is the statutory deposit of the strict liability doctrine the Supreme Court built in the oleum leak litigation of the nineteen eighties. Schedule II’s heads are generous in enumeration, covering death, disability, loss of wages, medical expenses, damage to private property, the expenses of government and local authorities in relief and in administrative or legal action, harm to fauna and flora, the cost of restoring the environment, loss of business or employment, and other claims arising from the handling of hazardous substances. The remedial scheme, read together, is that of a compensation tribunal and a restoration authority fused into one body, which is why the description of the tribunal as merely an appellate board, the common summary, is wrong in a way that matters.

The record of these powers in use is the strongest evidence for the institution’s defenders. The tribunal’s benches have directed closure of polluting units, ordered remediation of contaminated sites, banned open burning of waste in the litigation associated with Almitra H. Patel, prohibited categories of older diesel vehicles from the roads of the national capital region, and imposed environmental compensation on event organisers whose use of a river floodplain damaged it. Each of these interventions used a different part of the remedial triad, and several used the restitution limb rather than a money award. The criticism that attends the same record, that closure and prohibition sometimes ran ahead of the evidence before the bench, is taken up in the assessment below; the institutional point is that no other Indian forum combines the power to stop an activity, to price the harm and to order the environment itself repaired in a single proceeding.

Appellate jurisdiction: consents, directions and clearances

Section 16 gives the tribunal appellate jurisdiction over ten specified classes of order, each made on or after the commencement of the Act. The classes track the regulatory life of the scheduled statutes. From the water statute come appeals against orders of the appellate authority under section 28, orders of the State Government under section 29, and directions issued by a pollution control board under section 33A, the closure and stoppage directions that are the boards’ sharpest instrument. From the cess statute comes the appeal against the appellate authority under its section 13. From the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 comes the appeal against an order or decision of the State Government or other authority under section 2, which is the forest diversion approval. From the air statute comes the appeal against the appellate authority under section 31. From the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 come three heads: any direction issued under section 5, the omnibus direction power that includes closure; an order granting environmental clearance; and an order refusing environmental clearance. From the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 comes the appeal against a determination of benefit sharing or an order of the National Biodiversity Authority or a State Biodiversity Board.

The clearance appeals deserve emphasis because they are where the tribunal most often sits in judgment on the executive itself. A grant of environmental clearance under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 is appealable by a person aggrieved, and so is a refusal, which means project proponents and affected communities meet in the same forum on opposite sides of the same order. The tribunal in such appeals reviews the appraisal process, the conditions imposed and the material considered, and it can suspend or quash a clearance. This is the jurisdiction the National Environment Appellate Authority held in embryo from 1997, and the contrast in volume and consequence between the authority’s record and the tribunal’s is the clearest single measure of what the 2010 redesign achieved. Two limits structure the appellate remit. The order appealed must post-date the Act’s commencement, so the tribunal is not a route for reopening the clearance history of the nineteen nineties. And the appeal right belongs to a person aggrieved, a standing formula that the tribunal has read in keeping with the environmental character of the statute, broadly enough to include community and public interest applicants, since section 18 separately authorises applications by any person aggrieved, including a representative body or organisation.

Procedure, principles and the discipline of parity

Section 19 frees the tribunal from the procedural codes and binds it to something else. The tribunal is not bound by the procedure laid down in the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, and is not bound by the rules of evidence in the Indian Evidence Act, 1872; it is guided by the principles of natural justice and may regulate its own procedure. For discharging its functions it holds the powers of a civil court in specified matters: summoning and enforcing attendance and examining witnesses on oath, requiring discovery and production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavits, requisitioning public records, issuing commissions, reviewing its own decisions, dismissing for default and deciding ex parte, passing interim orders including injunctions and stays, and passing an order requiring a person to cease and desist from violating a scheduled enactment. The cease-and-desist power, in section 19(4)(j), is the procedural root of the tribunal’s celebrated and contested closure jurisprudence: it can order the violation to stop first and argue about remedy after.

Section 20 then supplies the substantive discipline, and it is one of the most unusual provisions in Indian tribunal legislation. The tribunal shall, while passing any order or decision or award, apply the principles of sustainable development, the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle. Parliament did not merely empower the tribunal to use these doctrines. It directed the tribunal to apply them, converting three judge-made principles of Indian environmental law into a statutory instruction that binds every bench in every order. The consequences are practical. A bench that ignores the precautionary principle in a case of scientific uncertainty has not merely reasoned thinly; it has failed to apply its statute. A bench that lets a polluter externalise the cost of remediation has misapplied the polluter pays direction. Section 20 is the provision teachers quote and the provision appellants invoke, and it is a large part of why the tribunal’s orders read differently from those of the appellate authority it replaced: the authority applied a statute, while the tribunal must apply a statute through three named principles.

The bench discipline completes the picture. Decisions are taken by majority under section 21, with the Chairperson resolving an equally divided bench by hearing the matter or referring it to other members. The parity rule in section 4 means that the standard bench joins judicial and expert members in equal number, so the tribunal’s characteristic order is a genuinely co-authored product: legal members who have run trials and expert members who have run laboratories, boards and field programmes. Litigants assembling a record for such a bench work with expert committee reports, inspection notes, board files and correspondence in office formats, and tools that let a practitioner read spreadsheets, documents and presentations in a browser through the ReportMedic office file viewer have become part of the unglamorous machinery of preparing an environmental appeal. The informality of the procedure is deliberate and double-edged: it lowers the cost of access for villagers and community organisations, and it is also the surface on which the criticism of evidential looseness fastens, as the assessment below records.

The clocks: limitation as the tribunal’s sharpest edge

No feature of the Act defeats more genuine claims than its limitation scheme, and no feature better repays exact statement. Section 14 applications, the original jurisdiction, must be made within six months from the date on which the cause of action for the dispute first arose. The tribunal may allow the application to be filed within a further period not exceeding sixty days where it is satisfied the applicant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing in time. Section 15 claims for compensation, relief or restitution carry a longer window, five years from the date on which the cause for compensation or relief first arose, with the same further period not exceeding sixty days for sufficient cause. Section 16 appeals must be preferred within thirty days from the date on which the order, decision, direction or determination is communicated, again with a further period not exceeding sixty days for sufficient cause. The pattern is uniform and deliberate: a short primary period fitted to the subject, and a condonation cap of sixty days that leaves the tribunal almost no discretion once it lapses.

Three consequences follow. First, the phrase first arose does decisive work: in continuing pollution the fight is often over when the cause of action first arose, and benches have had to distinguish a continuing wrong, which generates a fresh cause as the discharge continues, from a completed act with continuing consequences, which does not. Second, the sixty-day caps have been litigated as jurisdictional limits rather than as flexible standards, and the tribunal’s benches have generally treated themselves as unable to condone delay beyond them however sympathetic the case, which is why late environmental challenges so often migrate to the High Courts, whose writ jurisdiction carries no equivalent statutory clock. Third, the institution’s own speed obligation sits in section 18(3): an application or appeal shall be dealt with as expeditiously as possible and an endeavour shall be made to dispose of it finally within six months of filing. The endeavour clause is aspirational rather than jurisdictional, but it states the design’s expectation plainly.

Must the tribunal finish a case within six months of filing?

Section 18(3) directs that applications and appeals be dealt with as expeditiously as possible and that an endeavour be made to dispose of them within six months of the date of filing, after hearing the parties. It is an endeavour clause, not a limitation on the tribunal’s power, so a case that runs longer does not fail for that reason.

The general position described in this section is legal information about a statute, not advice on an individual case, and any person working against one of these clocks should treat the periods as unforgiving and take advice on the specific facts. What can be said structurally is that the limitation scheme is part of the tribunal’s bargain: Parliament offered a specialist forum, informal procedure and expert benches, and in exchange demanded that environmental grievances be brought fast, while the evidence and the harm are still capable of assessment. Critics of the scheme answer that environmental harm is often discovered late, that communities learn of a clearance or a discharge long after the clock starts, and that a sixty-day condonation cap converts the tribunal’s accessibility into a trap for the uninformed. Both positions are stated in the passage record and in the case law, and the honest summary is that the clocks are the point at which the Act’s promise and its practice diverge most sharply for exactly the litigants the forum was built to serve.

The civil court bar and the single appeal

Section 29 closes the ordinary courts to the tribunal’s business in two movements. From the date of the tribunal’s establishment, no civil court has jurisdiction to entertain any appeal in respect of a matter the tribunal is empowered to determine under its appellate jurisdiction. And no civil court may settle a dispute or entertain a question relating to a claim for relief, compensation or restitution of property or environment that the tribunal may adjudicate, and no injunction may be granted by a civil court in respect of an action taken or to be taken by or before the tribunal in such a matter. Section 33 gives the Act overriding effect over inconsistent law. What the bar does not touch is constitutional jurisdiction: the writ powers of the High Courts under Article 226 and of the Supreme Court under Article 32 are not the jurisdiction of a civil court, and they survive, which is why the forum map of Indian environmental litigation has the tribunal and the High Courts running in parallel, with the choice between them often decided by the schedule, by standing and by the limitation clocks.

Enforcement is built to match. An award, order or decision of the tribunal is executable by the tribunal as a decree of a civil court under section 25, and the tribunal may transmit it to a civil court of local jurisdiction for execution as that court’s own decree; unpaid compensation is also recoverable as arrears of land revenue. Section 26 backs the whole structure with a penalty for failure to comply with any order, award or decision: imprisonment for a term that may extend to three years, or a fine that may extend to ten crore rupees, or both, with an additional fine for a continuing failure that may extend to twenty-five thousand rupees for every day the failure continues. Where a company fails to comply, the fine may extend to twenty-five crore rupees, with a further one lakh rupees for every day of a continuing failure. Offences under the Act are deemed non-cognisable, and cognizance requires a complaint by the Central Government or its authorised officer, or by a person who has given sixty days of notice of the alleged offence.

The appeal route is section 22, and it should be stated exactly because error here is common. Any person aggrieved by an award, decision or order of the tribunal may appeal to the Supreme Court within ninety days from the date of communication of the award, decision or order, on one or more of the grounds specified in section 100 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, which are the second appeal grounds centred on a substantial question of law. The Supreme Court may entertain an appeal after ninety days if satisfied the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause. There is no intermediate appellate tier and no appeal to the High Court. The design is deliberate: the tribunal’s orders go straight to the apex court, on a narrow question-of-law standard, which both elevates the tribunal’s effective authority and explains why the Supreme Court’s environmental docket contains so many challenges to tribunal orders, including the suo motu question taken up next.

Acting on its own motion: the Ankita Sinha settlement

The Act nowhere says in terms that the tribunal may initiate a case itself. Section 18 describes applications by injured persons, property owners, legal representatives, persons aggrieved including representative bodies, and governments and boards. For years the tribunal nonetheless took up matters on the basis of letters, news reports and its own notice of environmental harm, and its power to do so was contested as proceedings began without the trigger the statute describes. The question reached the Supreme Court in Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai v. Ankita Sinha, decided on 7 October 2021 by a three-judge bench, in a case that began when the tribunal acted on a news report about the mismanagement of solid waste at the Deonar dumping ground in Mumbai. The Court held that the tribunal is vested with suo motu power in the discharge of its functions under the Act. The reasoning proceeded from the character of the institution: the tribunal’s broad mandate of securing environmental protection includes identifying and intervening in environmental problems on its own initiative, the power cannot be confined by procedural insistence on a formal complainant, and within the contours of its statutory mandate the nature of the trigger, a letter or a self-initiated proceeding, cannot curtail the role of a specialised forum charged with protecting the right to a healthy environment within Article 21.

The holding should be stated neither wider nor narrower than it is. It establishes that the tribunal may act on its own motion, within its statutory jurisdiction: the schedule gate and the substantial question requirement still govern what it may take up, and suo motu initiation does not enlarge the list of statutes it may apply. It does not settle every procedural question about how self-initiated cases should be staffed, pleaded and answered, and the Court’s judgment itself framed safeguards around the practice. The constitutional discomfort the practice generates is real and deserves its strongest statement. A body that detects a violation, frames the proceeding and then adjudicates it combines functions that the accusatorial design of adjudication usually separates, and the respondent in a suo motu case faces a forum that has already formed a preliminary view that something is wrong. The defence, which the Court accepted, is grounded in the remedial character of environmental harm and in the asymmetry of environmental litigation: the people injured by a dumping ground or a discharge are frequently those least able to brief counsel, assemble expert evidence and file within six months, and a tribunal forbidden to move until they arrive would fail the mandate for which it was created. Between those positions the evidence supports a verdict on the narrow point: the power exists, it is bounded by the schedule like everything else the tribunal does, and its legitimacy in any given case depends on the procedural fairness of what follows the initiation, which is where criticism should concentrate.

Benches, vacancies and the capacity question

The tribunal sits at a principal bench at New Delhi and at four zonal benches, at Bhopal for the central zone, Pune for the western zone, Kolkata for the eastern zone and Chennai for the southern zone, with circuit sittings available under the procedure rules for places away from a bench’s ordinary seat. The geography is the access policy: environmental harm is distributed across the whole territory, and a litigant in the east or south was not meant to litigate in Delhi. The bench structure is also the institution’s vulnerability, because a bench can sit only when both its judicial and expert complements exist, and the parity rule converts every unfilled expert post into a constraint on the judicial side as well.

The operating record on numbers is one of chronic shortfall against the sanctioned band. The tribunal’s own published bench-wise position for 30 September 2025 recorded 5,301 cases pending across the five benches, a figure that states the docket’s scale rather than its failure, since disposal rates in the tribunal have generally tracked or exceeded institution rates in the periods for which the environment ministry has given Parliament figures. The capacity complaint is more specific than pendency. It is that benches have repeatedly worked below strength, that vacancies in the chairperson’s office and among members have at times left zonal benches unable to sit in their designed composition, and that the volume and geographic spread of environmental disputes in a country of India’s size presses against a structure whose ceiling is twenty members of each kind. This is the pattern the series has documented for the company law tribunals and for the goods and services tax appellate structure: Parliament creates a specialised forum of genuine design quality, and the appointment system then treats its staffing as an afterthought, so the institution is judged on a record produced at partial strength. The tribunal’s disposition endeavour of six months under section 18(3) is achievable for a fully staffed bench and is a standing reproach when benches sit short.

The general tribunal reform legislation intersected with this position in the way described in the composition discussion: the four-year tenure and fifty-year minimum age introduced across tribunals in 2021 were defended by the government as standardisation and attacked by the Madras Bar Association and other challengers as instruments of executive leverage over bodies that decide against the executive daily, until the Supreme Court’s November 2025 judgment struck down the core provisions and directed the creation of a National Tribunals Commission. For the green tribunal the stakes of that argument are unusually concrete, because the Union and its instrumentalities are respondents in a large share of its docket, and the security of a member’s tenure is the practical guarantee that a clearance granted by the government can be quashed by the government’s own appointees. The institution profile verdict on capacity is therefore two-sided by necessity: the design asks the appointment system for little, a chairperson and up to forty members, and the system’s failure to keep even that modest establishment filled is a policy choice with measurable consequences for access in the zones.

The criticism, stated fairly, and the verdict

The case for the tribunal, in its strongest form, is the one its defenders among environmental lawyers make. Environmental disputes turn on scientific assessment that ordinary courts cannot supply from their own knowledge: whether an effluent load is lethal to a fishery, whether an impact assessment has honestly modelled a project’s effects, whether remediation has actually restored a site. The expert member model has produced technically informed orders, the informal procedure and broad standing have opened a forum to communities that could never have mounted a writ petition, and the remedies, closure, compensation and restitution in one proceeding, exceed what the replaced appellate authority could offer by an order of magnitude. The Supreme Court’s confirmation of suo motu power in 2021 ratified the institution’s self-understanding as an active guardian rather than a passive umpire.

The case against, in its strongest form, is made by industry respondents and by appellate outcomes. Closure and prohibition orders have on occasion rested on committee reports and inspections that the affected party had no fair chance to test, and the Supreme Court has set aside or moderated tribunal orders that travelled beyond the evidence or beyond the schedule. The charge of jurisdictional overreach is the mirror image of the suo motu virtue: a tribunal encouraged to act feels its way toward subjects, wildlife among them, that Parliament withheld. The capacity critique completes the indictment: a forum designed for speed has carried vacancies for long stretches, zonal access is uneven, and the limitation clocks that presuppose a prompt, reachable tribunal bear hardest on claimants in the regions the benches reach least well. Each element of the criticism is supported by instances; none of it answers the design question, which is whether Indian environmental adjudication would be better returned to the generalist courts and the board appellate authorities. On that question the record since 2010 permits a clear answer. It would not. The tribunal’s defects are defects of staffing, scheduling by Parliament and occasional evidential discipline, all of them correctable within the statute, and two of them correctable by a single notification under section 34 that no government has chosen to issue.

That is the institution’s profile in one sentence: a specialist forum of real remedial power, deliberately fenced by a seven-statute schedule, whose most discussed flaw, the absence of wildlife and the forest law of 1927 from its remit, is the one flaw its statute gives the executive the express power to repair. Until the schedule is amended, the practical rule for every reader of this article is the one with which it opened. Ask first not whether the grievance is environmental, but under which statute it arises. The schedule, and not the subject, decides the forum.

The definitions that do the gatekeeping

Practitioners who work the tribunal’s docket learn quickly that section 2 decides more cases than any hearing does. Three definitions carry the load. The definition of environment is borrowed from the umbrella statute and is deliberately interrelational: water, air and land, and the inter-relationship that exists among and between them and human beings, other living creatures, plants, micro-organisms and property. The definition matters because it lets a bench treat an aquifer, a fishery and a village’s health as one system rather than as separate complaints. The definition of person is expansive, running from individuals and Hindu undivided families through companies, firms, associations, trustees and local authorities to every artificial juridical person, which closes off standing arguments based on the applicant’s legal form. And the definition of a substantial question, examined earlier in this profile, ties the original jurisdiction to direct violations of specific statutory environmental obligations with community-level consequences, or to consequences flowing from a specific activity or a point source of pollution.

The accident definitions deserve separate notice because they activate the compensation scheme. An accident is a fortuitous, sudden or unintended occurrence while handling a hazardous substance or equipment, plant or vehicle, resulting in continuous, intermittent or repeated exposure to death, injury, or damage to property or the environment, excluding an accident caused only by war or civil disturbance. A hazardous substance takes its meaning from the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, above quantities specified under the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991. Read together with the no-fault rule in section 17, these definitions convert the tribunal into the forum Parliament intended in 1995 and failed to build: a place where the legal work in an industrial accident case is the assessment of harm and the apportionment of responsibility, not a decade-long contest over whether negligence can be proved against a plant’s operators. The definitions also explain why the tribunal’s compensation docket is bounded by the schedule twice over, once through section 14’s jurisdictional sentence and once through section 15’s requirement that the damage arise under a scheduled enactment.

Standing and access: who may come to the tribunal

Section 18’s catalogue of applicants was drafted for the reality of environmental harm, in which the injured are numerous, dispersed and often unorganised. The injured person may apply, as may the owner of damaged property, the legal representatives of a person killed by environmental damage, and agents authorised by any of them, with a protective rule that where some legal representatives have not joined, the application is made on behalf of all and the non-joining representatives are impleaded as respondents. Beyond the directly injured, any person aggrieved may apply, and the section states expressly that this includes a representative body or an organisation. Governments and regulators complete the list: the Central Government and State Governments, Union territory administrations, the Central and State Pollution Control Boards and pollution control committees, local authorities, and any environmental authority constituted under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 or another law in force.

Two features of this catalogue repay attention. The first is that the regulators are applicants as well as respondents. A State Board that has failed to move a district administration or a recalcitrant industry can itself carry the matter to the tribunal, and boards have used the forum to obtain directions with an authority their own orders lacked. The second is the proviso at the end of the standing clause: a person who has preferred an appeal under section 16 cannot also maintain an application for relief or compensation or settlement of the same dispute. The Act forces an election between the appellate track and the original track for the same grievance, a small provision with large consequences for litigation strategy, since the appeal route is confined to the order under challenge while the application route can reach the underlying violation. The filing fee and form are prescribed by rules and have been kept low relative to the stakes of the litigation, and the tribunal’s practice of acting on letters and, after 2021, on its own motion, sits on top of this standing architecture as a further widening of the door.

How a bench works: committees, inspections and interim protection

The tribunal’s working method diverged early from the trial model, and the divergence explains both its admirers and its critics. Because benches are not bound by the evidence code and may regulate their own procedure, the tribunal developed a practice of constituting expert committees: panels of scientists, engineers, board officials and academics sent to inspect a site, test a discharge, audit a project’s compliance or value environmental damage, and report to the bench. The committee device converts the bench’s own expert membership into a method rather than merely a credential. Instead of choosing between the parties’ hired experts, the bench commissions a neutral assessment and then tests it in argument. Site inspections by members, joint inspections ordered through the district administration, and continuing supervision of remediation through periodic reports all belong to the same method. The original applications concerning river pollution, municipal waste and industrial clusters have characteristically run for years as supervised proceedings, with the bench retaining the case while compliance is reported in instalments, a style closer to a regulator’s docket than to a concluded trial.

Interim protection is the method’s sharp edge. Section 19 empowers the bench to pass interim orders, including injunctions and stays, after hearing the parties, and to require any person to cease and desist from violating a scheduled enactment. In practice this has meant stay of construction on a challenged clearance, suspension of operations at units found discharging untreated effluent, and prohibitions on activities, from waste burning to the plying of vehicle categories, pending final disposal. The power to hold the position while the science is settled is what makes the tribunal worth approaching in an emergency, and it is also the power most often criticised when an interim order hardens into a final outcome without the evidence being fully tested. The statutory answer to that criticism lies in section 23, which arms the bench on costs: where a claim is held not maintainable, or false or vexatious, the tribunal may award costs including lost benefits caused by an interim injunction, a discipline meant to price speculative litigation and to compensate respondents held up by orders later shown to be unjustified. The costs power has been used sparingly, and its sparing use is itself part of the debate about whether the tribunal’s informality is calibrated correctly.

Merits review in clearance appeals

The clearance appeal is where the tribunal’s expert character meets its hardest doctrinal question: how far may it go in reviewing a decision that the executive has already taken through its own appraisal machinery. The tribunal’s benches answered expansively in the early years, examining not only whether the appraisal process was followed but whether the environmental material justified the clearance, and treating the impact assessment as a document to be tested rather than a formality to be noted. The Supreme Court’s treatment in Hanuman Laxman Aroskar v. Union of India, decided in 2019 in a challenge arising from an airport project’s clearance, is the anchor authority. The Court engaged with the merits review the tribunal had undertaken, accepted the legitimacy of a specialised forum scrutinising the substance of an environmental appraisal, and rested its own disposal on the adequacy of the appraisal material, while insisting that sustainable development, the very principle section 20 commands the tribunal to apply, frames the inquiry. The exchange between the two forums is the mature form of the institution’s appellate life: the tribunal reviews the executive on the science and the process together, and the Supreme Court reviews the tribunal on law, each within the appeal structure of section 22.

The clearance jurisdiction also exposes the institution to its most political cases, since every major mine, port, highway, river valley project and industrial estate in the country passes through an appraisal that a person aggrieved can carry to a zonal bench. Project proponents complain that appeal converts a time-bound clearance into open-ended litigation, and that benches substitute their judgment for that of the expert appraisal committees constituted under the impact assessment notification. Community applicants answer that the appraisal committees meet without public scrutiny, that conditions are imposed without monitoring, and that the tribunal is the first forum in the sequence in which the affected population is heard at all. Both accounts describe real features of the system. The institutional verdict supported by the record is that the appeal works as a quality control on appraisal, imperfect and occasionally intrusive, and that its existence has changed behaviour upstream: appraisal documents are prepared in the knowledge that an expert bench may read them closely, which is a regulatory effect no amount of appellate authority inactivity ever produced between 1997 and 2010.

The tribunal among tribunals: independence as a working condition

The green tribunal’s appointment and tenure history cannot be separated from the constitutional litigation over tribunals generally, because the Supreme Court’s tribunal jurisprudence has been written in cases about bodies much like it. The Madras Bar Association line of decisions, running from the National Tax Tribunal case of 2014 through the challenges to the tribunal rules of 2017 and 2020 and the Tribunals Reforms Ordinance and Act of 2021, established the controlling propositions: tribunals that substitute for High Courts in a field must be staffed and secured so as to be worthy of the substitution, executive dominance of selection undermines the design, short tenures purchase pliability, and the conditions of service of members cannot be left to the discretion of the government that appears before them. The 2021 reforms legislation, which reached the green tribunal along with the rest of the system, was Parliament’s attempt to codify a standardised model of four-year tenure, a fifty-year minimum age and search-cum-selection committees with significant executive membership. The Supreme Court’s November 2025 judgment striking down the core of that model, and directing the establishment of a National Tribunals Commission to supervise appointments and administration across the tribunal system, therefore governs the green tribunal’s future as directly as it governs any other body’s.

For this institution the abstraction has a concrete edge. The tribunal’s appellate docket consists largely of challenges to the Central Government’s clearances, to State Governments’ orders and to boards the governments control. Its original docket names ministries, municipal corporations and public sector undertakings as respondents in case after case. A member whose reappointment, tenure or post-retirement prospects depend on executive goodwill is being asked, structurally, to decide against the hand that holds those prospects, and the Act as enacted recognised the risk by denying reappointment altogether and by fixing a five-year term with judicially supervised removal. The reform era diluted the denial by making members eligible for reappointment under the general model, and the constitutional litigation of 2021 to 2025 can be read, in this institution’s terms, as a fight over whether the dilution stands. The profile’s assessment is that the tribunal’s environmental record, which includes clearance suspensions and closure directions against state-favoured projects, was produced under the enacted tenure design, and that any account of the institution which treats appointment law as an administrative detail misses the mechanism by which its independence is either kept or lost.

The enforcement chain: from order to consequence

An institution profile should follow an order to its end, because a tribunal whose orders dissolve at the enforcement stage is a debating society with a seal. The Act’s chain runs as follows. The order is a decision by majority with a casting mechanism for equal division. It is executable by the tribunal itself as a decree of a civil court, or transmissible to the local civil court for execution as that court’s decree. Compensation unpaid within the time the order specifies is recoverable as arrears of land revenue, the state’s most summary collection process. Money awarded for environmental damage is routed to the Environmental Relief Fund rather than left in private hands. Non-compliance is an offence punishable, for individuals, with imprisonment up to three years or a fine up to ten crore rupees or both, and for companies with a fine up to twenty-five crore rupees, each with daily fines for continuing default, and the deemed guilt provisions of sections 27 and 28 reach the persons in charge of a defaulting company and the heads of defaulting government departments, subject to a due diligence defence. The head-of-department rule deserves emphasis: Parliament legislated on the assumption that the likeliest defaulter would be the state itself, and wrote personal exposure for the responsible official into the Act rather than leaving governmental non-compliance to the slow remedy of contempt.

Set against that chain, the recorded weakness is not legal but administrative. Execution proceedings, fund utilisation and prosecution sanctions all depend on agencies outside the tribunal, and the interval between a restoration order and a restored site is filled with committee reports, compliance affidavits and further hearings of the kind the bench method generates. The tribunal’s characteristic response has been supervision rather than escalation: retaining the case, demanding periodic reports, and converting its registry into a monitoring office. Critics of the institution treat that supervision as mission creep, a tribunal becoming a permanent administrator of waste systems, river stretches and industrial estates. Defenders answer that environmental orders differ from money decrees precisely because the defendant’s compliance is a physical process measured in seasons, and that a forum which pronounces and departs will be defied by inertia. The Act’s text supports the defenders on the narrow point: restitution of the environment, the third limb of section 15, is an order that cannot be executed in a day, and a statute that commands it must contemplate the forum staying to see it done.

Three grievances, three forums: the schedule at work

The institution’s design is best tested against the grievances that actually arrive. Take first a village downstream of a chemical cluster whose wells have turned saline and whose fish catch has collapsed. The discharge is a violation of obligations under the Water Act and the Environment (Protection) Act, both scheduled, the consequences are community-wide and broadly measurable, and a point source exists. The village, or an organisation acting for it, files an original application under section 14 within six months of the cause of action arising, joins a compensation claim under section 15 within its five-year window, and asks for interim directions to stop the discharge. The bench can commission an expert committee, order remediation, apportion liability among the units contributing to the load, and direct compensation under the Schedule II heads. Every element of the design, parity bench, principles, restitution, fund routing, is engaged by this single grievance, and it is the case the tribunal was built for.

Take second a proposal to mine inside the buffer of a tiger reserve, where the community’s objection is that the habitat cannot bear the disturbance. If the challenge is framed under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, attacking the protected area position and the wildlife clearances administered under that statute, the tribunal has no door to open: the statute is unscheduled, and the remedy is a writ petition in the High Court, where the bench will be learned in law and dependent entirely on the parties for the ecology. If the same project needs diversion of forest land, the approval under section 2 of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 can be appealed to the tribunal under section 16, and if it needs an environmental clearance, that grant can be appealed as well, so fragments of one project reach the expert forum while its wildlife core does not. The litigant’s counsel must therefore plead the project apart, statute by statute, which is a skill the schedule forces and the subject matter does not justify.

Take third a municipal corporation whose untreated sewage has for years entered a river, a grievance with no single industrial respondent and no prospect of a villager financing litigation against the municipality. This is the case that produced the suo motu settlement: a news report can trigger the tribunal’s own proceeding, the municipality and the State Board become respondents, and the bench supervises a remediation plan over successive hearings. The three grievances together map the institution’s true shape. Where the schedule, the standing rules and the initiation power align, the tribunal is the most complete environmental forum in the country’s history. Where the schedule withholds the statute, the same harm, the same science and the same urgency are returned to the generalist writ court, and the difference in forum is attributable to nothing in the grievance itself.

The afterlife of the scheduled statutes

A schedule is a snapshot, and the seven enactments of 2010 have not stood still. The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Cess Act, 1977 was repealed in 2017 in the tax settlement that accompanied the goods and services tax, leaving the second entry in Schedule I without a living statute beneath it, though cess appeals from the period of its operation had already run their course. The Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 was amended in 2023, in legislation that also renamed it the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, and redefined the categories of land to which its clearance requirement applies, amendments whose effect is to narrow or widen the tribunal’s appellate docket without any change to the tribunal’s own Act, since the schedule incorporates the statute as it stands from time to time. The Biological Diversity Act, 2002 was amended in 2023 in ways that decriminalised its offences and restructured benefit sharing, again altering what the tribunal reviews under section 16 from outside its own text. And the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 recast the penalty chapters of the water, air and environment statutes toward monetary penalties administered by adjudicating officers, a change that bears on the tribunal’s appellate work over board action even though the tribunal’s own penalty section was left as enacted.

The institutional lesson of this drift is that Schedule I is a living junction rather than a fixed boundary. Every amendment to a scheduled statute silently amends the tribunal’s working remit, and every repeal silently shrinks it, which is why the power in section 34 to add statutes by notification matters more with each passing session. The schedule’s omissions are not only the two famous ones. Any new environmental statute Parliament enacts, on subjects from waste streams to climate obligations, enters the tribunal’s world only if it is scheduled, expressly or by notification, and the drafting habit of connecting a new Act to the tribunal has been inconsistent. A profile of the institution must therefore record that its jurisdiction is decided in three places: in its own section 14, in the schedule as enacted in 2010, and in the amendment practice of every later Parliament, which has so far preferred to legislate around the tribunal rather than through it.

What the tribunal changed upstream

The measure of a forum is not only the cases it decides but the behaviour it induces in the system that feeds it. Three upstream effects are visible in the tribunal’s record. The first is documentary. Environmental impact assessments, consent files and inspection reports are prepared differently when their authors know that a bench containing expert members may read them line by line on appeal. The appraisal culture inherited from the appellate authority’s dormant years, in which a clearance file was unlikely ever to be examined by a technically equipped forum, has been displaced by an expectation of scrutiny, and practitioners on the project side describe clearance strategy as beginning with the tribunal’s likely questions rather than ending with the ministry’s order.

The second effect is on the boards. The pollution control boards remain the system’s front line, issuing consents, monitoring compliance and directing closure under their own statutes, but the tribunal’s appellate jurisdiction over board appellate orders and section 33A directions, combined with its willingness to summon board records and to constitute committees where board monitoring has failed, has made the tribunal a supervisor of the regulators as much as a court above them. Boards appear as respondents defending inaction and as applicants seeking the tribunal’s authority against recalcitrant industries, and both postures have strengthened the boards’ hand in the field in ways the appellate authority never achieved. The third effect is temporal. Environmental litigation in the writ courts was measured in years of interlocutory drift; the tribunal’s endeavour standard, its supervised-proceeding method and its interim powers compressed the first, most consequential phase of a dispute, the phase in which the discharge is stopped or the construction is stayed, into months. Even where final disposal takes longer, the interim compression is the change affected communities feel.

None of these effects required a single amendment to the Act. They are the yield of the design operating at partial strength, which is the strongest available answer to the argument that the institution has disappointed. The disappointment is real but it is located precisely: in the vacancies that kept benches short, in the schedule that kept wildlife out, and in the clocks that keep late claimants from the door. A critic who locates the failure in the concept itself has to explain why a dormant appellate authority and an uncommenced compensation statute, the two predecessors, are preferable to a working forum with those three correctable defects.

Open questions the institution carries forward

The profile closes with the questions the statute leaves genuinely open, because an institution article should mark the boundary between the settled and the contested. The first is whether the schedule will ever be completed. The notification power under section 34 has existed since 2010, the parliamentary laying safeguard answers the democratic objection, and the wildlife exclusion has been criticised across the political spectrum of environmental opinion, yet no government has laid the notification. Whether the reason is administrative caution about the tribunal’s docket, the forest bureaucracy’s defence of its own appellate channels, or simple legislative inertia, the omission is a standing decision renewed by silence each year.

The second open question is the architecture of appointments after the November 2025 judgment. The direction to create a National Tribunals Commission promises an appointments and administration body for the whole tribunal system, and the green tribunal, with its dependence on a narrow pool of senior judges and senior scientists, is the institution with most to gain from a commission that plans successions instead of reacting to retirements. The third open question is doctrinal: the content of the substantial question threshold in section 2(m) continues to be worked out at the admission stage, and the balance the benches strike between gatekeeping and access will decide whether the original jurisdiction remains a community remedy or hardens into another clearance appeal by other means. The fourth is the relationship between the tribunal’s supervised proceedings and the executive’s own remediation programmes, where duplication and friction are documented and the boundary of the judicial role remains contested, in terms the Ankita Sinha arguments framed but did not end. These are live questions about a working institution, which is itself the final contrast with 1995 and 1997: the Republic’s first two attempts at environmental adjudication left no open questions, because they left no functioning forum to ask them about.

Reading the record: what the docket actually contains

The tribunal’s docket sorts into recognisable families, and the families explain the institution better than any aggregate figure. The first family is industrial pollution: applications against clusters and individual units for discharge into water bodies and emission into air, characteristically ending in closure directions, environmental compensation computed on the polluter pays principle, and supervised remediation. The second family is waste: municipal solid waste, sewage and legacy dumpsites, the docket of the Almitra H. Patel proceedings and of the Deonar matter that produced the suo motu judgment, in which the respondents are municipalities and state agencies and the orders run to plans, timelines and monitoring committees rather than to a single defendant. The third family is the clearance docket: appeals against environmental clearances, forest diversion approvals and coastal and mining permissions, in which the tribunal reviews the state’s own appraisal. The fourth family is episodic and visible: the prohibition on older diesel vehicles in the national capital region, the proceedings over the condition of Bengaluru’s lakes after fires on Bellandur lake drew national attention, the floodplain proceedings arising from a large cultural festival on the Yamuna, and river and sand-mining proceedings across the zones. Each family uses a different part of the Act, and the families together show why a single performance statistic misleads: a clearance appeal is a review proceeding of weeks, a waste proceeding is a supervision of years, and their pendency figures cannot be averaged into sense.

The zonal distribution of the docket carries its own information. The bench-wise position published for 30 September 2025, with 5,301 cases pending in total, showed the principal bench at New Delhi and the western zone bench at Pune carrying the largest shares and the eastern and central benches considerably smaller ones, a distribution that tracks industrial geography and litigation access together. The disposal pattern across the institution’s life, in the figures the environment ministry has laid before Parliament in successive answers, has generally matched or exceeded the rate of institution in settled years, which is why the pendency complaint, properly stated, is not that the tribunal decides slowly in the aggregate but that its capacity leaves benches exposed: a single retirement in a zonal bench can stall a whole family’s hearings, because the parity rule requires the expert complement to sit with the judicial one. The special drives the tribunal has run, including drives directed at cases older than five years, are an administrative answer to that exposure, and the deeper answer remains the unglamorous one of appointments made before vacancies arise.

The record also contains the institution’s education of the legal profession. Environmental practice before 2010 was a writ practice, concentrated in Delhi and the High Court towns, conducted on affidavits and constitutional principle. The tribunal created a trial-grade environmental bar in five cities, fluent in effluent standards, assessment methodology and remediation costing, and the change in the profession’s composition is one of the least reversible consequences of the Act. Whatever happens to the schedule or the tenure rules, a generation of advocates, board officials and project consultants has been formed by the expectation that environmental claims will be examined by a forum able to weigh the science, and that expectation shapes advice given long before any filing is contemplated.

The distinctions on which the institution turns

The institution rewards readers who hold its distinctions cleanly, because most public error about the tribunal is a collapsed distinction. The first is between the original and the appellate doors: section 14 admits a dispute, section 15 prices and repairs the harm from it, and section 16 reviews an order somebody else has made, and each door has its own applicant, its own clock and its own standard. The second is between the tribunal and its predecessors: the authority of 1997 reviewed one kind of order and nothing else, the tribunal of 1995 existed only as an uncommenced text, and the body of 2010 holds original, appellate, compensatory and restorative powers together. The third is between the schedule and the subject: a matter is not within the tribunal because it is environmental, but because it arises under one of seven named statutes, and the Forest (Conservation) Act and the Wild Life (Protection) Act stand on opposite sides of that line despite governing adjoining ground.

The fourth distinction is among the clocks: six months to bring a dispute, five years to bring a compensation claim arising from it, thirty days to appeal an order, ninety days to carry the tribunal’s own order to the Supreme Court, with condonation capped at sixty further days at each of the tribunal’s three doors and left to the Supreme Court’s sufficient cause standard at the fourth. The fifth is between the civil court bar and the survival of the writ: section 29 closes the civil courts to the tribunal’s business and leaves Articles 226 and 32 untouched, so the tribunal and the constitutional courts share the environmental field by statutory design. The sixth is between the principles and the powers: section 20 does not enlarge what the tribunal may do, it disciplines how it must reason while doing it, and a bench that reaches the right order by ignoring the polluter pays principle has still misapplied its Act. The seventh and last is between liability and fault: the compensation scheme holds the person responsible for an accident liable without proof of negligence, while liability for the adverse impact of an activity is assessed on the evidence of impact and contribution, with apportionment where the harm is combined. A reader who can state these seven distinctions can predict, for almost any environmental grievance, the forum, the route, the clock and the remedy, which is precisely the competence the institution was created to make ordinary.

The tribunal and the states

The schedule’s boundary is not the only federal line in the institution’s life. The pollution control system the tribunal supervises is itself federal: State Boards issue the consents, monitor the industries and issue the closure directions that generate much of the appellate docket, while the Central Board coordinates and the Central Government holds the clearance and forest diversion powers that generate the rest. A zonal bench therefore spends its appellate life reviewing the work of institutions of two different levels of the Union, and its original jurisdiction regularly joins a state municipality, a State Board and a central ministry in one proceeding. The unscheduled territory has a federal dimension too: state enactments on forests, trees and allied subjects stand outside the schedule alongside the two central statutes, so a dispute under a state tree preservation law follows the wildlife route to the High Court. The pattern that emerges is that the tribunal’s map of India is drawn by the provenance of the governing statute, central and scheduled on one side, everything else on the other, and the state of the environment in any given district is litigated in whichever forum its paperwork happens to select.

The institution’s relationship with state governments is correspondingly double. States are respondents in a large share of the docket, as clearance recommenders, as board controllers and as municipal overseers, and they are also beneficiaries, using the tribunal’s directions to compel their own agencies and to discipline industries that local politics protect. The zonal benches sit in state capitals and work through district administrations for inspections and execution, so the tribunal’s effectiveness in a zone is partly a function of the administrative cooperation of the very governments it directs. None of this is a defect unique to the green tribunal; it is the ordinary condition of a national forum superimposed on a federal enforcement base, and the Act’s design, with its execution as decree and its recovery as land revenue arrears, shows Parliament legislating with that condition in view.

Filing in practice: form, forum and the first hearing

The practical path into the tribunal runs through section 18 and the rules made under the Act. An application or appeal is filed in the prescribed form, with prescribed particulars and documents and the prescribed fee, before the bench within whose territorial jurisdiction the cause of action or the impugned order arises, the territories of the five benches being notified under section 4. The Chairperson holds the power to transfer cases between places of sitting, a power used to relieve a burdened or short-handed bench and to gather connected matters. At the threshold, the bench tests the filing against the institution’s gates: the scheduled enactment, the substantial question where the original door is used, the standing of the applicant, and the clock. A filing that survives admission moves quickly by the standards of Indian litigation, because the tribunal’s method front-loads its intervention: interim protection is considered at the first hearings, committees are constituted early where the science is contested, and the parties are put to a schedule of compliance or proof rather than to a distant trial date.

Defects in the filing path are instructive. The commonest fatal defect is time, the six months of section 14 having run while the applicant pursued the boards or the district administration, which is why experienced environmental practitioners treat the administrative complaint and the tribunal clock as parallel tracks rather than as a sequence. The second commonest is the wrong door: an appeal dressed as an application to escape the thirty days of section 16, which the election proviso in section 18 and the benches’ admission scrutiny are designed to catch. The third is the wrong statute: a grievance pleaded in the language of environmental harm generally, without anchoring it to an obligation under a scheduled enactment, which fails the second limb of section 14 however serious the harm. Each defect corresponds to a design choice examined in this profile, and together they explain why the tribunal’s considerable accessibility, low fees, broad standing, letter petitions and suo motu power, coexists with a reputation among first-time litigants for unforgiving technicality. The forum is open; the gates are narrow; and the distance between those two facts is the distance a competent adviser exists to bridge.

Running the institution: staff, money and the Chairperson’s office

An institution profile owes the reader the unglamorous provisions, because they decide whether the celebrated ones can operate. The tribunal’s registry and staff are provided under sections 12 and 13: the Central Government determines the nature and categories of officers and employees the tribunal needs, recruitment is made by the Chairperson in the prescribed manner, the staff work under the Chairperson’s general superintendence, and the Chairperson exercises the financial and administrative powers vested by the rules, with power to delegate them to a member or officer who remains under the Chairperson’s direction and control. Section 11 covers the vacancy problem at the top: when the office of Chairperson falls vacant, the Central Government may authorise a Judicial Member to act as Chairperson until a new appointment is made. The members and staff are public servants within the meaning of the Indian Penal Code under section 31, and section 32 protects action taken in good faith under the Act from suit and prosecution.

These provisions read as boilerplate and function as load-bearing walls. The registry is where the supervised-proceeding method is administered, where committee reports are chased and compliance affidavits docketed, and a tribunal chronically short of members has often also been short of the registry strength its method requires. The acting Chairperson provision has been used repeatedly in the institution’s life, since appointments to the top office have rarely been timed to retirements, and each interregnum is a period in which the transfer power, the bench constitution work and the institution’s external representation are exercised on a caretaker basis. The vacancy in the Chairperson’s office attracts attention precisely because the office concentrates the tribunal’s administrative constitution: benches are constituted under the Chairperson’s authority, cases are transferred by the Chairperson, the casting mechanism in an equally divided bench runs through the Chairperson under section 21, and the invitation of outside experts in particular cases under section 4(2) is the Chairperson’s. An institution designed around parity and expertise is thus administered through a single office whose timely filling the Act assumes and the appointment system has repeatedly failed to guarantee. The contrast completes the capacity argument made earlier in this profile: the statute’s demands on the appointments process are small, specific and predictable years in advance, and the record of unfilled offices is therefore a record of choices rather than of accidents.

The constitutional frame around the tribunal

The tribunal is a statutory body, not a constitutional one, and the distinction shapes its relationship with the courts that surround it. Its preamble anchors it in the judicial construction of Article 21, under which the Supreme Court read the right to a healthy environment into the right to life, and the directive principle in Article 48A and the fundamental duty in Article 51A(g) supply the Constitution’s own environmental commitments in the background. The tribunal does not enforce those provisions directly. It enforces the scheduled statutes, and the constitutional frame enters its work through section 20’s principles, through the purposive reading the Supreme Court mandated in the suo motu judgment, and through the presence of the writ courts behind it. A claimant whose matter falls outside the schedule is not outside the Constitution, and the continuing vitality of environmental writ litigation is the proof: the High Courts built Indian environmental law for three decades before the tribunal existed, and they retain the whole field the schedule withholds, together with the power to strike down the scheduled statutes themselves, a power no tribunal possesses over its own parent Act.

That division of labour is the answer to the recurring proposal that the tribunal should simply replace environmental writ jurisdiction. It cannot, on its own statute, and the constitutional design would not permit a statutory body to oust the writ courts in any event. What the tribunal offers the constitutional courts is relief of a different kind: a first forum equipped to find the facts, so that the writ courts’ environmental docket increasingly consists of the matters the tribunal cannot take and the appeals its statute routes to the Supreme Court. The two-tier reality, tribunal below for the scheduled field and constitutional courts around and above it, is untidier than the blueprint of a single green court, and it is also the reason the system has redundancy where the pre-2010 system had only gaps.

The profile in one view

Draw the threads together and the institution resolves into a small number of structural facts. It is a creature of a single statute, Act 19 of 2010, established on 18 October 2010 after a fifteen-year prehistory of failure. Its jurisdiction is a list, not a field: seven scheduled enactments in, the wildlife statute and the forest law of 1927 out, with the executive holding an unused power to repair the list. Its benches are built on parity between judges and scientists, its reasoning is disciplined by three statutory principles, and its remedies run from stopping a discharge to restoring an ecosystem. Its clocks are the shortest in Indian civil justice, its appeal the most direct, running to the Supreme Court alone. Its chronic weakness is not design but supply: members, chairpersons and registry strength delivered late or not at all. A reader who holds those facts holds the tribunal, and can locate any particular controversy about it, over a clearance, a closure, a compensation figure or a self-initiated case, in the structure that produced it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What kinds of cases does the National Green Tribunal decide?

The tribunal decides civil cases that raise a substantial question relating to the environment and arise from the implementation of the seven enactments in Schedule I of its Act, together with appeals against specified orders under those enactments. Its docket therefore covers water and air pollution disputes, challenges to environmental clearances and board directions, forest diversion approvals under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, biodiversity benefit-sharing determinations, and claims for compensation and restitution arising from environmental damage including accidents involving hazardous substances. It does not decide criminal prosecutions for pollution offences, service disputes, or matters arising under statutes outside the schedule, however environmental their subject matter may be.

Q: Which laws are within the Green Tribunal’s jurisdiction?

Seven enactments are listed in Schedule I of the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010: the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974; the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Cess Act, 1977; the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980; the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981; the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991; and the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. A case must arise from the implementation of one of these before the tribunal can hear it, either as an original application under section 14, a compensation claim under section 15, or an appeal under section 16. The Central Government may add further Acts of Parliament to the schedule by notification under section 34.

Q: Why are the Wildlife and Forest Acts outside the Green Tribunal schedule?

No reasoned explanation for the omission appears in the passage record, and the article treats it as a legislative choice that has never been publicly justified. The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 and the Indian Forest Act, 1927 were both mature, prominent statutes when Schedule I was drawn, and the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, which governs the cognate subject of forest diversion, was included. The practical result is that wildlife and protected-area disputes, and questions under the forest law of 1927, must go to the High Courts by writ petition, before benches without the tribunal’s statutory expert membership, even though such disputes often turn on habitat and species science of exactly the kind the tribunal’s expert members exist to assess.

Q: Can the Green Tribunal act on its own motion?

Yes. The Supreme Court settled the question in Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai v. Ankita Sinha, decided on 7 October 2021, holding that the tribunal is vested with suo motu power in the discharge of its functions under the Act. The Court reasoned from the tribunal’s broad mandate of securing environmental protection and from the public interest character of environmental adjudication: the power to identify and intervene in environmental harm cannot be confined by insisting on a formal complainant. The power remains bounded by the tribunal’s statute, so a self-initiated case must still arise under a scheduled enactment and raise a substantial question relating to the environment, and the fairness of the proceeding that follows the initiation is where argument properly concentrates.

Q: What relief can the Green Tribunal grant?

Under section 15 the tribunal may order relief and compensation to victims of pollution and other environmental damage arising under the scheduled enactments, restitution of property damaged, and restitution of the environment itself for the area affected. Compensation is assessed under the heads in Schedule II, which include death, disability, loss of wages, medical expenses, damage to property, harm to flora and fauna, loss of business or employment, and the cost of restoring the environment. For accidents the tribunal applies the principle of no fault under section 17, and where several activities combine to cause the harm it may apportion liability among those responsible on an equitable basis. Relief under the Act is in addition to relief under the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991.

Q: Can you appeal against a Green Tribunal order?

Yes, but only to the Supreme Court and only on a narrow ground. Section 22 allows a person aggrieved by an award, decision or order of the tribunal to appeal to the Supreme Court within ninety days from the date the order is communicated, on one or more of the grounds in section 100 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, which centre on a substantial question of law. The Supreme Court may entertain a later appeal where the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing in time. There is no appeal to a High Court and no intermediate appellate forum, which is a deliberate feature of the design: the tribunal’s orders move directly to the apex court.

Q: Why did the earlier National Environment Tribunal never function?

The National Environment Tribunal Act, 1995 created a tribunal to award strict liability compensation for accidents involving hazardous substances, but the Act was never brought into force. No commencement notification was issued and no tribunal was ever constituted under it, so for fifteen years the statute existed only as a dead letter while accident victims used the ordinary courts and the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991. The reasons were institutional rather than doctrinal: a specialised body requires appointments, premises, staff and budget, and none followed enactment. The National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 repealed the 1995 Act in section 38 and enacted the working version of the idea, with the tribunal established within months of assent.

Q: Why is the Green Tribunal criticised for limited reach?

The criticism has three distinct strands. The first is jurisdictional: the schedule excludes the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 and the Indian Forest Act, 1927, so major conservation disputes never reach the expert forum. The second is geographic and institutional: the tribunal works through a principal bench and four zonal benches for the whole country, benches have repeatedly sat below their sanctioned strength because of vacancies among judicial and expert members, and circuit sittings only partly compensate. The third strand is temporal: the six-month limitation period for original applications, with condonation capped at a further sixty days, shuts out claimants who learn of a clearance or a discharge late. Each strand is a different problem with a different remedy, and they are often run together unfairly.

Q: What is the difference between the tribunal’s original jurisdiction and its appellate jurisdiction?

The original jurisdiction, under section 14, is the tribunal acting as the first forum: it hears civil cases raising a substantial question relating to the environment arising from a scheduled enactment, and settles the dispute itself. The compensation jurisdiction under section 15 belongs with it, since the tribunal there assesses harm and awards relief directly. The appellate jurisdiction, under section 16, is the tribunal reviewing decisions made by others: appellate authorities and boards under the water and air statutes, State Government orders, board closure directions, environmental clearance grants and refusals, forest diversion approvals and biodiversity benefit-sharing determinations. The distinction controls the entry document, the limitation period and the scope of review, so identifying which jurisdiction a matter falls under is the first analytical step in any tribunal case.

Q: Who can file an application before the National Green Tribunal?

Section 18 allows an application by the person who has sustained the injury, by the owner of property that has been damaged, by the legal representatives of a person whose death resulted from environmental damage, by an authorised agent of any of them, and by any person aggrieved, a phrase the section expressly extends to a representative body or an organisation. Governments and regulators may also apply: the Central Government, a State Government, a Union territory administration, the Central and State Pollution Control Boards, pollution control committees, local authorities and environmental authorities established under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 or other law. The breadth is deliberate, reflecting the public character of environmental harm, though the applicant must still bring the matter within a scheduled enactment and within the limitation period.

Q: What happens if an application is filed after the six-month limitation period?

Section 14(3) requires an original application to be made within six months from the date the cause of action first arose. If it is late, the tribunal may allow it to be filed within a further period not exceeding sixty days, provided it is satisfied the applicant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing in time. Beyond that further sixty days the statute gives the tribunal no further room, and the benches have generally treated the combined period as a jurisdictional boundary rather than a flexible guideline. The same architecture repeats across the Act: five years plus sixty days for compensation claims under section 15, and thirty days plus sixty days for appeals under section 16. A claimant outside the window entirely must look to the writ jurisdiction of a High Court, which carries no equivalent statutory clock.

Q: Does the National Green Tribunal follow the Code of Civil Procedure?

No. Section 19 states that the tribunal is not bound by the procedure laid down in the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, and is not bound by the rules of evidence in the Indian Evidence Act, 1872; it is guided by the principles of natural justice and regulates its own procedure. It nevertheless holds the powers of a civil court for defined purposes, including summoning witnesses and examining them on oath, requiring production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavits, issuing commissions, reviewing its decisions, passing interim orders and injunctions, and ordering a person to cease and desist from violating a scheduled enactment. Its awards and orders are executed as decrees of a civil court under section 25, so the informality governs how a case is heard, not whether its outcome can be enforced.

Q: What penalty follows if a company fails to comply with a tribunal order?

Section 26 makes failure to comply with an order, award or decision of the tribunal an offence. For an individual the punishment is imprisonment for a term that may extend to three years, or a fine that may extend to ten crore rupees, or both, with an additional fine for each day a failure continues after the first conviction. Where a company fails to comply, the fine may extend to twenty-five crore rupees, with an additional fine of one lakh rupees for every day the failure or contravention continues. Offences under the Act are non-cognisable, and a court takes cognizance only on a complaint by the Central Government or its authorised officer, or by a person who has first given sixty days of notice of the alleged offence.

Q: Can a High Court still hear an environmental case within the tribunal’s field?

Yes. Section 29 bars civil courts from entertaining appeals and claims that fall within the tribunal’s appellate and compensation jurisdiction, and section 33 gives the Act overriding effect, but neither provision touches the constitutional writ jurisdiction of the High Courts under Article 226 or of the Supreme Court under Article 32. Constitutional courts therefore continue to hear environmental matters, including matters under statutes outside Schedule I such as the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, and matters where a claimant is outside the tribunal’s limitation window or challenges the vires of a provision. In practice the schedule, the standing rules and the limitation clocks distribute work between the tribunal and the High Courts, and choosing the forum is a technical decision with real consequences.

Q: Where does the compensation money for environmental damage go?

Where the tribunal orders compensation or relief on the ground of damage to the environment, section 24 requires the amount to be remitted to the authority specified under section 7A of the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991, for credit to the Environmental Relief Fund established under that Act. The fund may then be used, in the manner and for the environmental purposes prescribed, notwithstanding the provisions of the insurance statute. The design separates two kinds of money in a tribunal award. Compensation payable to identified victims for death, injury or loss belongs to them, while amounts awarded for harm to the environment itself are channelled into a dedicated fund earmarked for environmental purposes, so that a public harm is answered with public restoration rather than an unallocated payment.

Q: What does no-fault liability mean in a tribunal compensation claim?

Section 17(3) directs the tribunal, in the case of an accident, to apply the principle of no fault. The claimant does not have to prove that the person responsible was negligent, careless or in breach of a duty of care; it is enough that death, injury or damage resulted from an accident, or from the adverse impact of an activity, operation or process under a scheduled enactment, and that the respondent is the person responsible for that activity. The principle is the statutory form of the strict liability approach developed for hazardous industries, reflecting the judgment that an enterprise which profits from handling hazardous substances should bear the cost of the harm those substances cause, without the victim having to reconstruct fault inside a factory or a plant.

Q: Where does the National Green Tribunal sit, and can it hear cases away from its benches?

The tribunal’s principal bench sits at New Delhi, and it has four zonal benches: Bhopal for the central zone, Pune for the western zone, Kolkata for the eastern zone and Chennai for the southern zone, each with a defined territorial jurisdiction notified by the Central Government. Section 4 also requires the procedure rules to address circuit sittings, under which a bench hears cases at a place other than its ordinary place of sitting within its territorial jurisdiction. Circuit sittings are the statute’s answer to the distance problem in a five-bench system, bringing the forum periodically to litigants who cannot travel to a zonal city, though their frequency depends on the tribunal’s working strength at the relevant bench.

Q: How are the tribunal’s members chosen, and who appoints the Chairperson?

Appointments are made by the Central Government. The Chairperson is appointed in consultation with the Chief Justice of India, and must be or have been a judge of the Supreme Court or a Chief Justice of a High Court; a High Court judge is also qualified to sit as a Judicial Member. Judicial and Expert Members are appointed on the recommendation of a selection committee constituted under the rules. Expert Members must meet the qualification track in section 5, either a science or engineering master’s degree with a doctorate and fifteen years of relevant experience including five years of practical environmental work, or fifteen years of administrative experience including five years of dealing with environmental matters. Members hold a single five-year term under the Act as enacted, with no reappointment.

Q: What counts as a substantial question relating to the environment?

Section 2(m) defines the phrase, and it is the gate through which every original application must pass. A question is substantial where there is a direct violation of a specific statutory environmental obligation, and the community at large, rather than only an individual or a group, is affected or likely to be affected by the consequences, or the gravity of damage to the environment or property is substantial, or the damage to public health is broadly measurable. A question also qualifies where the environmental consequences relate to a specific activity or a point source of pollution. The definition excludes purely private disputes and links the tribunal’s original jurisdiction to violations of obligations under the scheduled enactments, which is why the phrase is litigated so often at the admission stage.

Q: Why must judicial and expert members sit in equal numbers on a bench?

The parity requirement appears in section 4, which directs that the rules on the minimum number of members hearing a class of applications or appeals must provide that the number of Expert Members hearing a case equals the number of Judicial Members hearing it. The design premise is that an environmental case presents a compound question: what the law requires, and what the scientific and technical evidence shows. A bench of judges alone would have to borrow its science from party experts; a bench of scientists alone could not run a trial. Equal numbers make each discipline a co-author of the order rather than an adviser to it. Parity is also why vacancies bite so hard, since a missing expert member constrains the benches the judicial strength could otherwise staff.