Indian environmental laws are meant to help governments protect, conserve, extract and acquire natural resources in the processes of development. How are Indian environmental laws designed to perform these roles and how do they actually perform them? This volume lays out the legal frameworks of over two dozen Indian parliament-made environmental laws and nearly 20 executive-made environmental laws. Tracing developmental trajectories of laws requires the understanding that there are no single origins or sources and no predetermined linear pathways but only complex and intersecting contexts within which their development takes place. The preambular texts of laws, elaborate court papers and policy documents that carry varying definitions, meanings and interpretations present the possibilities and scope of these laws. When legal texts are opened up and reassembled, as we have tried to do in this volume, it is possible to see the overlaps, contradictions, duplication, fragmentation and confusions that are part of Indian environmental law.

Our motivations to put together this volume are threefold:

First, environmental laws have mostly been seen and studied as the territory of the judiciary. Most of the existing publications on environmental law provide readers with statutes and court cases. This gives the understanding that environmental laws are developed in courts. This is true to some extent if we look at the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s when higher courts were busy with environmental public interest litigations (PILs). This book can be seen as a complementary volume to those existing publications as it also focusses on the powerful role of the executive in the development of environmental laws. Since the 1990s, the central government, especially the newly formed Environment Ministry has had an unparalleled influence on the generation of legal frameworks to regulate the environmental impacts of all economic sectors. This volume seeks to put in perspective this influence so that those with an interest in the state of India's development can pay closer attention to the actions of India's large environmental bureaucracy.

A chapter dedicated to environmental institutions in this book underscores the enormous spread of regulatory institutions that are involved in the everyday operations of environmental law and their importance in today's environmental governance.