A Conversation about the Public Trust in India: Public Participation, Climate Adaptation, and India's 2G Network

Property lawyers in the United States love the Public Trust Doctrine (PTD). There's such a rich history. The doctrine, which holds that important resources must be held "in trust" for public use, originated in Roman law. Centuries later it was forced on King John through the Magna Carta. During America's industrial revolution, our Supreme Court invoked the doctrine to defend Chicago's shoreline from hungry rail barons (the case is called Illinois Central Railroad), and we've had it ever since. The PTD fascinates us at CPR too: we see it as a potentially powerful way to protect water resources in the United States. (Visit our Public Trust Doctrine page.) But some of the most interesting and expansive uses of the PTD are taking place on the other side of the world - in India. To learn more about those developments, I turned to Shibani Ghosh, a Research Associate at the Centre for Policy Research, where I am visiting for the semester. Ms. Ghosh is also a public interest lawyer and a visiting member of the faculty at TERI University in New Delhi. I asked Ms. Ghosh to help me understand how the PTD is used in Indian law. Our conversation - which touched on public participation, climate adaptation, and India's 2G network - is set forth below. RV: How did the PTD makes its way to India? SG: In the 1980s and '90s, the Supreme Court of India played a very active role in promoting rights-based litigation. Several landmark cases which have contributed to the growth of Indian environmental jurisprudence were decided during that time. One such case was MC Mehta v Kamal Nath. The issue before the Court in this case was the legality of the government's decision to regularize encroachment of reserved forest land by a private hotel in the state of Himachal Pradesh. The hotel had also tried to change the course of the river Beas on the banks of which the hotel was situated, so as to prevent instances of flooding and loss of property. Before the Supreme Court, the matter was argued against the hotel by MC Mehta, India's leading environmental lawyer and the judgment was written by Justice Kuldip Singh, arguably the country's foremost "green judge."