ON JULY 29, 2026, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court in Vanashakti v. Union of India (‘Vanashakti III’), struck down the 2021 Office Memorandum that had permitted violators to regularise ex post facto breaches of environmental law. Read quickly, this appears to be an environmental victory. But is it? A closer reading yields something else: a blueprint for the next round of regularisation.
There is a moment in Vanashakti III where the Supreme Court states a rule and then spends the following fifteen paragraphs reasoning its way out of it. At paragraph 36, Justice Joymalya Bagchi holds that a project built without prior clearance is void ab initio, that the wrongdoer cannot retain the “usufruct” of the wrong, and that the breach must therefore, “by necessary implication lead to the restoration of status quo ante extending to closure, demolition, remediation of environmental damage and recovery of costs”. This is the maximalist environmental position, and it is almost a verbatim reproduction of what the first decision, authored by Justice A.S. Oka in Vanashakti v. Union of India delivered on May 16, 2025 (‘Vanashakti I’), had held.
The judgment in Vanashakti III then sets about dismantling it. By paragraphs 38 and 39, the power to “control and abate” pollution under Section 3 of the Environment Protection Act (‘EPA’) has become wide enough to sustain a “violation-management mechanism” that brings errant units back into the fold “not by excusing the breach but by subjecting them to appraisal, penalty, environmental compensation remediation and future compliance”. By paragraph 40, the Jan Vishwas Act, 2023, which substituted criminal prosecution with civil penalty for various offences across 42 central Acts, is read as Parliament supplying a “relaxed legislative space” in which a “breach need not invariably result in dismantling, demolition or closure”. The movement between these two passages is the whole judgment, and it is the place to begin if one wants to grasp the long-term implications of the judgment.
