General Laws and Environment Protection — application of Tort law, Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code

The neighbour’s generator runs all night. The bakery downstairs sends smoke through your window. Long before anyone wrote a Pollution Control Board into a statute, people in these situations had two kinds of remedy: sue the neighbour, or complain to the police and magistrate. Those old remedies still exist. The question this topic asks is how far they go, and why the law needed to invent more.

In two minutes

Before and alongside the special environmental statutes, the general law gives remedies for pollution: tort (nuisance, negligence, Rylands v Fletcher, absolute liability), the criminal code’s public-nuisance offences, and the criminal procedure code’s magistrate powers. All work, but each has limits that explain why the specific Acts were passed.

The rest of this chapter

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