India’s unfinished environmental regulation

Debates on environmental clearance reform in India follow a familiar script. Approval processes are described as slow, overly cautious, and hostile to development. Reform, in this telling, lies in faster decisions, simpler procedures, and fewer regulatory layers. This logic has driven repeated amendments to clearance rules, the expansion of online portals, and tighter appraisal timelines. Yet environmental outcomes on the ground have not improved, and conflicts around projects continue to intensify. The problem is not that India regulates too much at the approval stage, but that it regulates too little once approvals are granted.

Environmental clearances function as one-time permissions rather than enforceable, ongoing regulatory commitments. Projects undergo elaborate scrutiny before approval, but once the clearance letter is issued, oversight weakens sharply. Conditions attached to approvals, covering emissions, waste management, biodiversity protection, and social safeguards, are rarely monitored with consistency. Monitoring mechanisms exist on paper, but enforcement in practice is weak, uneven, and largely reactive.

This imbalance is built into the institutional design of the system. Appraisal committees operate at the Centre, decisions are time-bound, and delays attract political scrutiny. Post-clearance monitoring is delegated to regional offices of the environment ministry and to state pollution control boards, institutions that are chronically understaffed and politically constrained. Reform efforts have focused on accelerating approvals rather than strengthening these downstream institutions.

The experience of the Sterlite Copper plant in Thoothukudi exposes the limits of this clearance-centric approach with unusual clarity. The plant operated for years with environmental clearance, regulatory consents, and a detailed set of conditions governing emissions, hazardous waste disposal, and groundwater protection. Over time, violations were repeatedly alleged by local communities and noted in regulatory inspections. Enforcement, however, remained sporadic. Notices were issued, penalties imposed intermittently, and compliance reports accepted largely at face value.

What failed was not the absence of conditions but the inability of regulators to enforce them in a sustained and credible manner. There was no continuous regulatory pressure to correct violations before they escalated. When the conflict finally erupted in 2018, resulting in deaths and the eventual closure of the plant, it was treated primarily as a law-and-order breakdown. In reality, it was the cumulative outcome of regulatory neglect. The Sterlite episode illustrates how weak post-clearance monitoring turns environmental regulation into crisis management.

Much of the policy debate, however, continues to fixate on the quality of environmental impact assessments, public hearings, and appraisal procedures. These concerns are not misplaced, but they obscure a more consequential weakness. Even when clearance conditions are robust, compliance relies heavily on self-reporting by project proponents. Six-monthly compliance reports are uploaded online with minimal independent verification. Field inspections are infrequent and often triggered only by complaints, media reports, or judicial intervention.

The consequences of this approach are visible across sectors. In thermal power, deadlines for ash utilisation and emission norms have been repeatedly extended rather than enforced. Infrastructure projects routinely alter layouts, expand capacities, or modify land use after approval, with post-facto regularisation becoming routine. Forest diversion conditions are often met through compensatory afforestation that bears little ecological resemblance to what was lost. In each case, clearance conditions remain formally intact but operationally hollow.

Coal mining in the Hasdeo Arand region of Chhattisgarh demonstrates a different but equally revealing failure, the gradual erosion of safeguards after approval. Long recognised as an ecologically significant forest landscape, Hasdeo Arand received mining clearances accompanied by explicit conditions on forest conservation, wildlife protection, and cumulative impact assessment. Over time, these safeguards were diluted through successive project amendments, stage-wise approvals, and administrative reinterpretations.

Monitoring of compliance on the ground remained weak even as mining expanded into contiguous forest blocks. Regulatory scrutiny focused narrowly on whether individual clearances had been formally granted, not on whether the cumulative environmental thresholds that justified those clearances were being breached. The result was not regulatory certainty but deepening conflict, with protests, litigation, and political intervention substituting for effective oversight. Hasdeo Arand shows how clearance conditions can steadily lose meaning in the absence of rigorous post-approval enforcement.

Coastal regulation reflects the same structural flaw. Coastal zone clearances are often blamed for delaying tourism and infrastructure. Yet much of India’s coastal degradation has occurred in areas where clearances were granted but compliance monitoring was weak. Illegal constructions, post-approval expansions, and violations of setback norms frequently go unchecked until judicial scrutiny forces action. Regulation intervenes after damage is done, not before.

Even major industrial accidents point to this pattern. Investigations routinely find that safety and environmental conditions attached to approvals were not complied with, inspections were irregular, and regulators lacked real-time oversight. Yet policy responses typically tighten approval norms rather than examine why existing conditions were not enforced. Reform cycles repeat without correcting the institutional deficit.

The political economy behind this is clear. Granting approvals is a discrete, countable act that aligns with narratives around investment and ease of doing business. Enforcement is continuous, resource-intensive, and often confrontational. It requires regulators to impose penalties, suspend operations, and withstand political pressure. Without strong institutional backing, enforcement remains the weakest link.

This creates perverse incentives. Firms that comply gain little advantage over those that do not. Non-compliance becomes a rational strategy when penalties are low, delayed, or negotiable. Communities lose faith in regulatory assurances, leading to protests and litigation that further delay projects. Weak post-approval enforcement thus generates the very uncertainty that front-end reforms seek to eliminate. 

India’s environmental problem is not excessive regulation but unfinished regulation. Speeding up approvals without enforcing conditions merely postpones environmental costs, which return later as conflict, litigation, and political crisis. Treating environmental clearances as one-time permissions has weakened both ecological protection and investor certainty. A credible reform agenda must therefore shift attention from faster approvals to firmer post-approval accountability, systematic monitoring, independent verification, and predictable penalties. Until regulation follows projects beyond the clearance letter, environmental reform will remain an exercise in administrative efficiency rather than environmental governance.

The author works in the fields of environment, wildlife conservation and public policy, with a focus on the impacts of infrastructure development on ecological systems.