Environmental Pollution Control

Prof. V. Ranganathan recently highlighted the need for intelligent environmental rule making. Environmental damage must be factored into decision making. But this does not imply wooden, babu-driven rules with either display ignorance of the environment or simply fail to make a proper trade-off between costs and benefits. The National Environmental Engineering Research Institute is our chief-fountain of expertise, but is inadequate in breadth and depth. There are no easy solutions. For a start, we need to greatly increase the number of independent institutions capable of environmental analysis, and ensure that these have international exposure to imbibe state-of-the-art skills.

The standard of numerous institutions appears to have deteriorated and politics has entered where it ought not to have been. However well designed a building, its strength ultimately depends on the human material running it. The tragedy of these closing decades of twentieth century is the declining values. The brick kiln is sick. The National Environment Tribunal Act (N.E.T. Act), 1995 is a comprehensive piece of legislation dealing with environmental pollution, its prevention and the disposal of compensation petitions by the valiant victims of environmental catastrophe. The problems human society is facing in terms of economic development, the crisis of energy, the tension between the poor and rich nations, and many geopolitical problems are invariably the outcome of mental pollution. Unless and until the mental pollution is controlled, the other type of pollution may not be successfully tackled by any number of environmental courts, and their substitution by tribunals or the like. The National Environment Tribal may not provide an answer to the issue relating to the pollution.

To keep the stream of justice clean and pure, a certain amount of religious sincerity of purpose must be imbibed in the minds of judges to preside over the Courts and Tribunals, only then a common man will have faith in the court of law and its accessibility in real sense. Access to justice as of toady is confined to a person immediately aggrieved and having a locus stand to maintain a cause of a direct personal injury.