29-04-2025
MoEFCC cannot rewrite environmental law through office memoranda, says NGT
The southern bench of the National Green Tribunal has annulled several environmental office memorandums (OMs) issued by the Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change (MoEF&CC) related to fuel source change in thermal plants.
The order, delivered by Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana on April 28, found these guidelines to be inconsistent with the principle of legality and raised concerns over the excessive reliance on subordinate legislation, which bypasses necessary parliamentary oversight.
The judgment was delivered in response to a petition filed by K. Saravanan, a resident of Chennai, who argued that the OMs diluted statutory safeguards under the Environment Protection Act, 1986, by exempting thermal plants from reassessing environmental impact despite significant changes in coal quality and emissions.
The guidelines, issued by MoEFCC on November 11, 2020, December 6, 2023, and January 7, 2025, were criticised for creating a blanket exemption from Environmental Clearance requirements for a variety of fuel source changes including cases of blending, domestic and imported coal so long as the blend falls within the specified threshold.
The bench found that this method of issuing executive orders without proper legislative oversight was inconsistent with the democratic principle that laws should be clear, publicly accessible, and properly debated.
'Permission to change the fuel source without amendment of EC can amount to submission of false information or suppression of information since the character of pollution as well as quantum of pollution load varies with the source of coal and combination of domestic & imported coal. It is to be noted that shifting to domestic coal will result in higher loads of fly ash generation ,' the bench noted.
The bench observed that although the fly ash notifications — amended multiple times between 1999 and 2022 — require thermal power plants to achieve 100% ash utilisation within three to five years and impose penalties for non-compliance, recent OMs have significantly diluted these environmental standards. 'The present case is the classic example to revisit the structural issue in India's environmental governance and its over-reliance on subordinate legislation and executive instructions,' the order stated.
