Pollution, floods, displacement and toxic waste do not fall evenly. Environmental justice asks who carries the burden of environmental harm and who enjoys the benefits — and insists that the answer should not track caste, class, ethnicity or income.

This reframing was radical. It moved ‘the environment’ from distant wilderness and charismatic wildlife to the everyday surroundings of ordinary people — the slum beside the drain, the fields beside the smelter, the basti downwind of the chimney.

Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier described an ‘environmentalism of the poor’: in the Global South, environmental struggles are rarely about leisure or scenery: they are about survival — access to water, forests, fish and clean air on which livelihoods directly depend.

Justice is not only about where the harm lands. It is about who got to decide. A community that was never consulted, whose objections were never heard, suffers an injustice even before the first tree is felled.

In 1982, the state of North Carolina chose Warren County — a poor, majority-Black county — as the dump site for soil contaminated with toxic PCBs. Residents lay down in the road to block the trucks. Over 500 were arrested.

Civil-rights leader Benjamin Chavis, then head of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, coined the term ‘environmental racism’ in the wake of Warren County.

A landmark 1987 report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, found that the single strongest predictor of where hazardous-waste facilities were sited was the race of the surrounding community — even after accounting for income.

The vocabulary ‘environmental justice’ travelled from the United States, but the struggles are indigenous and older. India has a deep tradition of communities defending forests, rivers and air — long before the term existed.

In 1973, in the Chamoli district of the Garhwal Himalaya, villagers — many of them women — embraced trees to stop contractors from felling them. Chipko (‘to cling’) became a global symbol of grassroots forest defence.

On the night of 2–3 December 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. Thousands died within days; many more died and were maimed in the years that followed.

A proposed hydroelectric dam on the Kunthipuzha river threatened to drown the Silent Valley rainforest in Kerala. A sustained campaign by scientists, poets and citizens led the government to abandon the project and declare a national park in 1984.

Scholars of environmental justice distinguish three dimensions. A struggle can win on one and still fail on the others — so it helps to name them separately.

This is the most visible dimension — the dump in the Dalit hamlet, the refinery beside the fishing village, the park in the gated colony. It asks: is the burden shared fairly?

Before a community can be fairly heard (procedure) or fairly treated (distribution), it must first be recognised as a community with standing, knowledge and rights. Adivasi and Dalit communities are often denied this at the outset.

A cheque can address distribution while leaving procedure and recognition untouched. People who were never consulted, whose sacred land was treated as empty, are not made whole by money alone.

Where the US movement names race, the Indian reality is structured by caste, class and tribe. Dalit and Adivasi communities are disproportionately exposed to polluted land, hazardous work and displacement — a pattern some scholars call environmental casteism.

India has its sacrifice zones: the thermal-power and coal-ash belt of Singrauli; the industrial clusters of Vapi and Ankleshwar; tanneries along stretches of riverbank. The air and water of the few are spent for the convenience of the many.

Manual scavenging — the manual cleaning of human excreta from dry latrines, sewers and septic tanks — is banned by law (the 2013 Act), yet persists. It is done almost entirely by Dalit communities, and workers still die from toxic gases in sewers and tanks.

Millions of waste pickers — largely Dalit, Muslim, migrant and women — sort and recover the recyclables that keep Indian cities from drowning in their own waste. They handle the toxic without protection and are rarely counted as workers.

When the well runs dry or the forest recedes, it is most often women who walk further for water and fuel, who breathe the smoke of a biomass chulha, and who manage scarcity in the home.

A cruel geography: much of India's coal, bauxite and iron ore sits beneath the forests of central and eastern India — the homelands of Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) communities. Extraction repeatedly means their displacement.

Climate justice extends environmental justice to the planet. The countries and classes that contributed least to greenhouse gases — the poor of the Global South — face the harshest floods, heatwaves, cyclones and crop failures.

After decades of demands from vulnerable nations, a Loss and Damage Fund was agreed at the UN climate talks (COP27, 2022; operationalised at COP28, 2023) — a hard-won recognition that some harm is already irreversible.

Holding warming to safe limits leaves only a finite carbon budget of remaining emissions. The justice question: should that budget be split by current emissions, by population, or by historical responsibility?

Colonial-era forest laws declared vast forests state property and recast the communities who had lived in them for generations as encroachers. Independence did not immediately undo this; forest-dwellers remained legally insecure for decades.

The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 — the FRA — recognises the rights of Adivasis and other forest-dwellers to live in, use and govern the forests they have long depended on.

A radical feature of the FRA: the Gram Sabha — the full village assembly — is the authority that initiates and verifies claims. It shifts power over the forest from the forest department toward the community itself.

The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 — PESA — extends local self-government to tribal Scheduled Areas and empowers the Gram Sabha to safeguard community resources, customs and, crucially, to be consulted before land acquisition and mining.

Since 1947, tens of millions of Indians have been displaced by development projects, with Adivasis vastly over-represented. A majority were never adequately resettled — displacement without rehabilitation.

The LARR Act, 2013 (Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement) promised consent, social-impact assessment and rehabilitation — raising the legal bar for acquiring land.

Pollution — of air, water and soil — is among the largest environmental causes of disease and premature death in India. And the burden, as ever, falls hardest on the poor, who cannot move away from it.

Two people in the same city do not breathe the same air. The poor live closer to traffic, industry and waste-burning; cook with biomass; and work outdoors. The well-off retreat behind purifiers and air-conditioning.

India is among the largest generators of electronic waste, and most of it is processed in the informal sector — burned, acid-bathed and dismantled by hand in dense urban clusters, releasing lead, mercury and dioxins.

Communities ringed by chemical and industrial estates — in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and beyond — live with contaminated groundwater, effluent in fields, and elevated rates of respiratory and skin disease.

Coal anchors the economies of states like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and West Bengal — supporting millions of jobs directly and indirectly, plus the local trade, transport and revenue built around them.

Renewable energy creates jobs — in manufacturing, installation and maintenance. But the new jobs may be in different places, demand different skills, and go to different people than the coal jobs they replace.

Large solar and wind parks require vast areas, often classified as ‘wasteland’ — a label that erases the pastoralists, herders and commons-users who actually depend on that land.

Climate justice is not only about cutting emissions. Hundreds of millions still need more clean, reliable energy to escape poverty — for light, cooking, irrigation and small enterprise.

Behind almost every environmental protection in India stands a movement — villagers, fishers, forest-dwellers and their allies who refused to be sacrificed. Understanding EJ means understanding resistance.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), led from the 1980s by activists including Medha Patkar, challenged the large dams on the Narmada — above all the Sardar Sarovar — over the displacement of hundreds of thousands, mostly Adivasi and farming families.

When a company sought to mine bauxite from the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha — sacred to the Dongria Kondh Adivasi community — the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that the Gram Sabhas should decide. Every village voted no.

For years, villagers in Jagatsinghpur, Odisha resisted a massive proposed POSCO steel plant and captive port that would have taken their betel-vine farms, forests and fishing grounds. The project was eventually abandoned.

Coastal fishing communities — among India's poorest — resist ports, power plants, reclamation and pollution that destroy spawning grounds and block access to the sea. From the Kerala coast to Mumbai's Koli villages, the sea is both home and workplace.

PILs have driven major environmental rulings — from cleaning the Ganga to relocating polluting industries and mandating CNG for Delhi's public transport. The courts became an arena where the unheard could be heard.

Environmental defenders — especially Adivasi and rural activists — face intimidation, criminalisation and violence. The Thoothukudi firing and attacks on land and forest activists are stark reminders.

Indian courts have repeatedly affirmed this principle, ordering polluting industries to fund clean-up and compensate affected communities — making the cost of harm sit with its cause.

Indian courts adopted this doctrine to protect rivers, beaches and forests, treating the government as a trustee accountable to the people — not an owner free to sell the commons.

Indian courts have read the right to life (Article 21) to include the right to a clean and healthy environment — alongside constitutional duties on the state (Article 48A) and on citizens (Article 51A(g)) to protect nature.

The National Green Tribunal, established by statute in 2010, is a specialised court for environmental cases. It combines legal and scientific expertise and is designed to deliver speedier, more accessible environmental justice.

Courts in Uttarakhand once declared the Ganga and Yamuna ‘living entities’ (a ruling later stayed), echoing moves in Ecuador and New Zealand. The frontier question: can a river sue on its own behalf?

Communities need not wait for official data. With low-cost air and water monitors, smartphones and simple protocols, residents can document pollution themselves — community science that makes the invisible visible and credible.