The Centre must stop targeting the NGT

The Tribunal is important for the country’s long-term sustainability

The National Green Tribunal (NGT)’s journey since its inception in 2010-11 has not been easy: Despite being a body constituted by an Act of Parliament, the Supreme Court in the initial years had to intervene to ensure necessary administrative arrangements were made by the government for the tribunal to become functional. Over the years, the NGT has emerged as a critical player in environmental regulation, passing orders on issues ranging from pollution to deforestation to waste management. These issues more often than not come in conflict with what is known as the development agenda of governments, which sometimes tend to be short-sighted. Unsurprisingly, governments always look for opportunities to clip the NGT’s wings.

That the NGT’s problems are real was evident when recently the Delhi High Court aimed a barb at the Centre. “Would you like to wind up the NGT?” the court asked the Centre, while hearing a plea seeking directions to authorities to fill the vacant posts in the tribunal. That the government was targeting the NGT was clear in July, when the Centre modified the process of appointments to the Tribunal, bringing in clauses that experts said will weaken the country’s environmental watchdog. The new rules do away with a condition that the NGT can only be headed by a former Supreme Court judge or the chief justice of a high court, and takes away the judiciary’s control on the process to appoint the tribunal’s members. Opposition parties and constitutional experts said such a move chips away at the independence of these institutions.

The State’s excessive desire to control autonomous bodies such as the NGT will be a great disservice to the nation; we need an independent body that can control the executive, which does not seem to think that long-term sustainability is as important as short term economic gains.