Tribunals

When the National Green Tribunal asked IPL stadiums to justify their use of groundwater, it reopened a decade-old contest between water as a human right and water as an economic commodity, one that India’s archaic groundwater laws are ill-equipped to resolve.

Between 1985 and 2019, Foreigner Tribunals in Assam have declared over 63,000 persons as foreigners in ex-parte proceedings. In the absence of a steadfast procedure to re-scrutinise these decisions, Assam’s citizens continue to be treated with indignity, stripped of their citizenship in their own country

Despite recognising that grave and irreversible injustice would be caused to the ecosystem, the National Green Tribunal simply refused to examine on merits the case made out by the appellants. It did so by restricting the examination of the appeals to whether requisite procedures had been followed or not.