ENVIRONMENTAL EMERGENCY: A PERSPECTIVE ON HORIZONTAL APPLICATION OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

This paper examines the trajectory of Indian environmental jurisprudence from its roots in ancient Vedic ethics to its contemporary articulation as a facet of the fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. It argues that Indian civilisational thought, grounded in Vedic and Puranic literature, envisaged an ethic of harmony between humanity and nature long before the emergence of modern environmental law, and that this ethic finds a functional, if largely unacknowledged, continuity in present-day statutory and judicial responses to ecological degradation. The paper traces the international origins of environmental consciousness in the Stockholm Declaration of 1972 and the Brundtland Commission's articulation of sustainable development, before examining the domestic response through the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, the Water and Air Acts, and the common law of nuisance, negligence, and strict and absolute liability. It further analyses the judicially coined concept of ‘Environmental Emergency’ developed by the National Green Tribunal, and undertakes a study of the Environment Impact Assessment regime, culminating in the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Vanashakti v Union of India striking down the ex post facto environmental clearance regime. Throughout, the paper foregrounds the horizontal application of fundamental rights the extension of Articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 21 to disputes between private polluters and affected citizens as the unifying doctrinal thread of Indian environmental law. It concludes that the recognition of a clean environment as a human right is not a modern judicial innovation but the constitutional crystallisation of an ethic Indian society has long recognised, and that the horizontal extension of fundamental rights remains indispensable to enforcing that ethic against private industrial and developmental excess.