The Judicial Fix for Forest Loss: The Godavarman Case and the Financialization of India’s Forests

In India, the setting up of large projects in forest areas can be undertaken only after government permission is obtained under the Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA) of 1980. Today, this approval process includes the enumeration and valuation of forest loss, and the financing of compensatory afforestation schemes to offset the loss. These procedures were designed through the orders and judgements of the Supreme Court of India in a set of cases that started in 1995 and continue to this day. These procedures are purportedly aimed to protect and restore forest ecologies in India. In this article we analyse the Supreme Court’s processes and orders between 1996 and 2006 which transformed the political ecology of forests in India. The judicial and expert discourses treated forest regulation and conservation as a techno-managerial exercise, separating it from social-ecological concerns such as historical dispossession of Adivasis and other forest-dependent people, and violent state suppression of diverse forms of forest management. The judicial interventions are instructive to understand the policy processes of green neoliberalism and the implications of the financialization of forests on environmental governance in India.

The ‘Essential Practices’ Doctrine

This article explores how the Supreme Court of India, in applying the judicial doctrine of ‘essential practices’, has embarked on a dangerous exercise of determining whether a particular religious practice is significant enough to warrant constitutional protection under Article 25(1) or not. In tracing a string of judgments, it shows how courts have been guilty of making ill-founded observations about the validity of religious practices, thereby detrimentally affecting religious groups and minorities. Due to this constitutional transgression, the question of ‘what is essentially religious’ turned into the question of ‘what is essential in religion’. The court has neither the right nor the expertise to decide if the religious practice indeed is ‘essential’. State intervention is warranted only based on constitutionally stipulated restrictions of ‘public order’, ‘morality’ and ‘health’. The cardinal rule ought to be of limited state intervention but maximum protection.

The Legal Defect in the Conditional Prohibition of Manual Scavenging in India

This article problematizes the definitional discourse of manual scavenging in Indian legislative interven-tions and its judicial treatment by the Supreme Court of India. It assesses the evolution of the definition of manual scavenging and the judicial treatment of it to cull out the insufficiency of legal doctrines and judicial interpretations in its elimination. It is argued that the career of legal prohibition of manual scavenging, despite deploying new measures to promote the elimination and rehabilitation, is antithetical to the very objectives of the legislations due to a paradoxical definitional discourse. The paradox is discerned by problema-tizing the condition-based permissibility of manual scavenging, where the usage of protective gear is the excluding criterion for identifying manual scavengers and perpetuates the practice. This condition-based permissibility has been a key burden on the discourse of elimination, as no such measures, it is argued, can mitigate discrimination, humiliation and stigma faced by manual scavengers. After identifying the conditional prohibition of manual scavenging, the article makes normative suggestions towards the adoption of a non-condition–based complete prohibition approach rooted in the understanding of human dignity. This must be complemented with the complete rehabilitation of individuals and complete mechanization of sewage work.

Compensatory justice to the victim of a crime and judicial practices in India: An empirical study

The Constitution of India guarantees that justice shall be delivered to all. The duty to ensure that justice delivery is accessible to all is entrusted to state bodies. The legislature is expected to ensure that the legal framework is there, the executive is expected to ensure that all infrastructural needs of the justice delivery system are in place, and the judiciary is expected to ensure that justice is delivered in their area. This paper deals with the issue of delivery of victim justice, with a special focus on compensatory mechanisms laid down under the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973. The Code empowers the courts to award compensation to the victim of a crime to ensure his/her rehabilitation. In light of the observations made by the Supreme Court of India that the trial court judges do not exercise their discretionary power under the relevant statutory provisions to award compensation to the victims of a crime, this paper explores the extent of such failure and the reasons behind it.

Representation of Indian Religion in the Short Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

India, with its plethora of religions and cultures, has been an enigmatic place for foreigners. Hinduism, a way of life more than being a religion (as proclaimed by the Supreme Court of India), has often been misunderstood by outsiders. Sometimes a biased attitude is reflected in the literature produced by these foreigners. A person like Thomas Babington Macaulay, who himself admitted that he had no knowledge of Sanskrit or Arabic, had the foolish courage of saying that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. In this paper we shall analyze the representation of religion in the short stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Engaging Contract Labour: Learnings from Landmark Judgements

Despite debates on its hiring, contract labour is a growing form of employment in India. Establishments usually maintain a workforce composition of both regular workers and contract labour for optimizing their available resources and ensuring financial prudence. However, in the process, they often get embroiled in compliance issues related to regularization and ‘equal pay for equal work’ in the context of contract labour. In this article, we have explored the different judicial interpretations of the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, on contract labour. For this, we have referred to the landmark judgements passed by the Supreme Court of India on the deployment and regularization of contract labour, and also their entitlement to equal pay for equal work. A scrutiny of these judgements directs us to advise establishments to avoid engaging contract labour in their core and perennial activities. Considering the statutory provisions and the possible legal complications, we have recommended some measures to establishments to mitigate the underlying risks in deploying contract labour alongside regular workforce in similar kinds of jobs or activities. We propose that the legislative framework grants flexibility to industries to generate employment to contract labour, without compromising on the rights of these workers.

Spreading Environmental Awareness Through Environmental Education in Schools: The Case Study of a Sikkimese Green School

The subject of environmental education (EE) in India, also known as environment studies (EVS), was introduced through the intervention of the Supreme Court of India (SC). At that time, there was also global recognition towards the creation of ‘environmental citizens’ through inculcating environmental awareness in school-going children, with the motto of ‘catch them young’. Since then, EE in India has seen an evolution in itself through enveloping the studies of various topics related to the natural environment. However, one of the concerns has been that it is taught in a theoretical manner and that since it is not treated as a graded subject, schools have not given it the importance it deserves. However, the study of a green school of the Himalayan state of Sikkim shows that active participation of state machinery, coupled with a practical interpretation of its principles, can lead to positive results. It also shows that the creation of environmental citizens needs a holistic approach, through both amalgamation of theory with practice and syllabus with stringent state intervention and results-oriented action. This article, which uses doctrinal, as well as field research, techniques of interview and observation, looks into these aspects through studying a school in a mountain village of West Sikkim in India.