As part of the globalized world, modern India faces the same problems and crises that other developing countries are struggling with: exhaustion of resources, degradation of the environment, an increase in the pressures to modernize, and a sharpening of the conflict between the mind-set of global capitalism and that of traditional cultural and religious values. Yet India has remarkable resources, spiritual and traditional, to bring to bear on these problems, including a fine democratic spirit and a proud legal and judicial history. The courts and the law stand proud in India.

The vastness of the Indian landscape is punctuated by monuments to glory, to struggle, and to disaster. In the northwest lies Kashmir, bordering on Pakistan, and the center of the current (and seemingly eternal) Muslim-Hindu struggle. To the southeast is Delhi, capital since the days in which it was a British city, home of the Independence Struggle and the Indian Congress Party. Here too lies the grave of Mahatma Gandhi, man of peace, who found both political and religious cause with the poor, and saw the two as one. To the south of Delhi is the Taj Mahal, the famous "monument to love," and further south, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, is Bhopal, home of Union Carbide and the worst gas-leak disaster the world has ever known.

Mahesh Chander Mehta, lawyer by profession and social activist by persuasion, interfaces these landmarks of modern India, moving between the villages of the Kashmir-Jammu area and the courts of Delhi, working in politics with the spiritual descendants of Gandhi, making social cause with the poor, defending the Taj Mahal itself when it suffered the ravages of pollution. If his predecessor, socialist Jayaprakash "J. P." Narayan, who battled corruption on all fronts, has been called "the Conscience of India," Mahesh Chander Mehta has been called India’s "Mr. Clean."

Born in the Jammu region in the state of Jammu and Kashmir shortly before the partition of Pakistan and India, Mehta was taken as a small child to Dhangri Village in the district of Rajauri. The family left its original village, Sohana, not because, as Hindus, they were in the minority but simply because it seemed better to avoid the trouble and strife of the border area. Mehta grew up in a village not far from the Panchal mountain range, which he describes as beautiful, hilly, and not far from the Kashmir Valley. The languages of the village were Dogri and Pakari.

The family was Brahman and Mehta’s father was a community leader, commanding a great deal of respect in the village of one hundred families or so, for he was literate. The family home was a village hub, the first stop for visitors to the community; later the father became head of the panchayat, or village council. The senior Mehta practiced religious toleration, had read the Qur’an, and believed in Hindu-Muslim unity. The son grew up with little religious training but as an adult says, "I can go to any temple and pay my respect to every religion."

Village life was simple. Everyone helped one another during harvesting and other important occasions. The houses were of mud. The village school was only one room, built mainly through the efforts of Mehta’s father, and here the children sat on rugs spread on the ground and wrote on wooden blackboards that were blackened out each morning, could be recycled for years, and were biodegradable.

By the time he was in high school, Mehta had to walk seven kilometers, fording two rivers along the way, to get to school each morning in the town of Rajauri. Some of the time he stayed with an aunt who lived in the town, but he often walked back to his village. He was not very happy with the teaching in the school, and he says he was not a good student either. In fact, for a while he was not attending classes but was hiding by the riverbank instead, as he was so terrified of one of the teachers. Mehta senior, ignorant of this, continued to make breakfast for him every morning and pack him off to school. The father was shocked when he found out the truth. Seeing how upset this made him, Mehta returned to class the next day.

When he finished high school, at about the age of eighteen, his parents wanted him to get married. But, instead, Mehta wanted to go to college in Jammu, a hundred kilometers away. He decided, essentially, to declare his independence from the family, go to school, and support himself, although he did maintain good relations with his parents and they continued to help him somewhat.

It took Mehta approximately ten years (1964–1974) to finish his Bachelor of Laws degree, but during that time he was working, often at more than one job, developing new interests, and setting life directions. His first job paid very little, but then a friend got him a job as an accountant for a shoe store. He did not know how to do accounts when he got the job, but the owner trusted him and he learned quickly. Then, when he was nearly ready to graduate, friends urged him to offer night classes ("coaching") for public school students, in a nearby day school that was empty at night. Eventually the night school enlarged and Mehta hired more teachers. He sometimes found himself standing in for them and teaching subjects he had not yet studied himself.

By 1970, Mehta had begun to take interest in various social activities—and he himself stresses that these were social and not particularly political, even though they were associated with Morarji Desai, who later became part of J. P. Narayan’s Janata Party, which opposed Indira Gandhi. Mehta participated in several camps and training sessions that were labeled Sevadal, which introduced the ideas of serving the rural areas and doing social service, as well as doing traditional meditation and yoga.

In 1971, Mehta started a weekly English newspaper called the Presager without, he says, realizing how much work would be involved in the enterprise. Here he discovered he had to be responsible for everything, from writing to typesetting, to selling ads; sometimes he simply could not get the paper out. In this weekly newspaper, he exposed many scams, revealing corruption fearlessly wherever it existed. His paper disclosed corruption in the corridors of power. Despite difficulties in attracting advertisers, he continued publishing the paper for sometime, often financing it with his own money. Eventually, he bought his own printing press to cut down on expenses for the newspaper and, simultaneously, to earn from taking on outside printing jobs. Several friends, including J. N. Kaul, Dr. Y. P. Sawhney, Dr. Kulwant Singh, and Professor Z. L. Jala, helped him and he managed to keep the paper going until about the time he got married in 1983 and subsequently moved to Delhi.

At the request of some friends, Mehta also helped to organize laborers working in shops, factories, and other commercial areas in Jammu, after making firsthand visits to the workplaces to assess the labor conditions. These initial fact-finding trips left him upset at the brutal conditions in which daily wage earners had to pull heavy carts or work near burning furnaces during summer, when the outdoor temperature was around 45 degrees centigrade—all for low wages. His experiences of working closely with these laborers for nearly a year gave him an insight into the living conditions and sentiments of poor workmen toiling under hazardous circumstances. At his initiative, a worker’s union was formed. He was pleased that workers could now fight for their rights and expose the terrible conditions under which they worked, even if their gains in actual wages were few. By the time the labor union became effective in 1975, however, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of Emergency, making it risky to organize workers or to speak out against oppression. Despite this, the new union continued meeting in a low-key way.

Mehta was developing an individual work style that was to stand him in good stead throughout his legal career. Like Mahatma Gandhi, the first thing he did when he heard of the problems of the laborers was to go to see them, do firsthand investigation—talk, listen, and experience. Later, he applied the same method in investigating cases involving child laborers, the Ganges River, and the Taj Mahal. In this way, he got to know about his cases thoroughly and to care about them passionately; both his knowledge and his passion came through in the courtroom.

Mehta became associated with the Jayaprakash Narayan Movement (better known as the JP Movement) in 1974. The movement was led by nationalists who were diametrically opposed to the government of Mrs. Gandhi. Three years later, when the Emergency was lifted, he worked with the Janata Party, an offshoot of the JP Movement. He became the party’s general secretary in Jammu and Kashmir as well as the national secretary of the party’s youth wing in the early 1980s.

In his final years of studying law, Mehta was doing so much outside work that he barely had time to attend classes. Not surprisingly, some of his teachers recognized his crusading spirit and the value of his work in social and human rights issues and thus excused him from rigorous class attendance. He finished his Bachelor of Law in 1974 and immediately opened up a law office in Jammu, from where he continued much of the work he had already been doing, but now as a lawyer. (Mehta explains that under the Indian system, after the Bachelor of Law, one is called to the Bar for an interview and then admitted on that basis.) He had three associates in the law office and they were, he says, all idealistic and honorable. They worked together mostly on civil and constitutional cases, planning together and even rehearsing court appearances. Especially because of the cases they took that dealt with human rights, they often appeared before the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir.

At one point, the prominent Indian writer Khushwant Singh wrote an editorial for the then widely read Illustrated Weekly of India in which he stated outright that the lawyers of India were more concerned with earning fees than with seeing justice done. Mehta took strong exception to this generalization and decided to file a defamation suit against Singh. Singh was in a very strong position as he was well known and also close to Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, and this was during the Emergency, hardly the finest hour for the rule of law. The famous author simply ignored the case until Mehta convinced the court to issue warrants against Singh. In the end, Singh had to appear in court, where he was granted bail and required to go to Jammu and print a public apology in the paper. While he was there, Singh also wrote a long article about state discrimination against the Jammu region in matters of employment and other opportunities, compared to Kashmir.

It was the practice in Mehta’s law office to set aside four hours every evening (from 4:00 to 8:00) as a time during which the office was open to anyone. People came to see him for legal aid cases and also for a number of other reasons: he was running the newspaper, he had been active in various social causes, and he had been involved in some political activities as well. Sometime in 1977 or 1978, a group of youths came to his office to ask him to head a youth organization called the Youth Action Committee to agitate for a more equitable sharing of power and resources between the three important areas of Jammu and Kashmir, namely, Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh. The problem was that although Jammu contributed much to the state and national governments in terms of natural resources and tax payments, most of the money that came back from the government was used to support development and employment in Kashmir. Under intense persuasion, Mehta agreed to head the youth organization, but he stipulated from the beginning that he was a believer in ahimsa, or nonviolent action.

With this in mind, the group began by launching a low-key sit-in demonstration, or dharna, in which five people a day simply sat with their banners in front of the state’s main office building. The youths, however, did not have much discipline and they soon disappeared, leaving Mehta to carry on alone. Undaunted, he began organizing small meetings with different sectors throughout Jammu and managed to keep the antidiscrimination dharna program alive, persuading five people each day to "sit." This went on for sixty days, at the end of which Mehta called a meeting of three hundred or so dharna participants to assess the situation. Many reacted by saying "See, we told you nonviolence wouldn’t work." Mehta suggested moving to the next level, that is, not only sitting on dharna but fasting as well.

Suddenly, people began to take notice of the Youth Action Committee, even if only two persons sat fasting through the long, cold winter days of December. The media also began to cover the group’s activities. One morning, without warning, the police removed the fasters and denied all knowledge of their whereabouts. A few people went to the police station to lodge a complaint about the missing protestors and about certain items that had also disappeared from the site, including some posters and a bamboo ladder. Police officials seemed concerned and promised prompt action. Soon afterwards, however, the missing ladder and posters were discovered lying in a corner of the police station itself. When word of this police "mischief" spread, crowds of demonstrators amassed opposite the police station and a large procession moved through the streets of Jammu to protest the police action and the state’s apparent complicity. Observing the high handedness of the police against the peaceful fast, people began to show solidarity with the movement. In meeting after meeting throughout the state, Mehta seized the moment to make more people aware of their rights to an equal share in development and employment opportunities. He succeeded in getting his message across and the movement grew larger.

In the face of the ensuing agitations and the growing popularity and influence of the youth movement, the state government panicked and instructed the police to arrest people involved in the protests. Youth leaders were arrested and tortured. Mehta now went underground. For the next two months, he shifted secretly from place to place, addressing villagers and building the movement from below. As popular sympathy swung in the direction of the movement, businesses in Jammu sometimes declared themselves bandh (closed) in solidarity. The Youth Action Committee had certainly made itself heard.

When the agitation reached its height, the state government engaged in a dialogue with political parties for a solution. Opportunistic politicians now stepped forward to form a commission to study the grievances and discrimination in Jammu. They took credit for the subsequent compromise in which, unfortunately, in Mehta’s eyes, Jammu did not gain autonomy. This disillusioned him about the politicians who, he felt, played tricks to muddy the issues and to overshadow the genuine cause of Jammuites.

During the same period, Mehta became acquainted with another "Mehta." This was Madhu Mehta, a social reformer and philanthropist who headed Hindustani Andolan, a group that worked against corruption, nepotism, and social evils such as the dowry and caste systems. The common thread of all these activities, says Mahesh Mehta, was moral values. Madhu Mehta invited him to become convener of this organization in Jammu and Kashmir. Hindustani Andolan thus provided him another platform from which to fight against corruption and other political and social ills.

Mehta’s ideological foundations were becoming stronger. He admired J. P. Narayan for his crusade against corruption and for social reforms. Mehta was a firm believer in equality and social justice and initially favored a rather liberal capitalist economic policy. However, in time he saw that to maintain such a policy with any degree of social justice, there had to be a strong political will and significant state regulation. He was especially concerned about the irresponsible attitude of multinational companies that answered to no one in the country. He came to favor the idea of state regulation within a decentralized system, in which each village or community ruled itself, made its own decisions and regulations, and solved its own problems within a national legal framework.

The Jayaprakash Movement, or JP Movement, brought new hope for millions of youths who wanted to see India a vibrant nation, an ideal state free from corruption, nepotism, and social evils. Being a part of that movement, Mehta cherished those values. In 1977, Mrs. Gandhi lifted the Emergency, but she subsequently lost in the general elections. A new government was formed by the Janata Party and Morarji Desai became prime minister of India. After the demise of Jayaprakash Narayan, a number of youth leaders who were at the forefront of the JP Movement were elected to the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) and some of them were named ministers in the new government. Mehta became disillusioned when he saw that the very same youth leaders who espoused the goals of JP started forgetting the values that the movement stood for. Infighting in the Janata Party weakened its moral authority. The leaders got carried away with the privilege, power, and prestige that goes with being in leadership positions. He cites the example of work-related travel and "sponsored trips" in which movement leaders chose to fly first-class (while Mehta himself followed behind by second-class train). Mehta did not formally resign from the Janata Party, but he more or less gave up his membership in 1983 when he got married and moved to Delhi.

The year 1983 proved to be a major turning point in Mehta’s life, but one he was ready for. He married Radha, a freelance writer and social activist. Mehta decided to give up his printing press and his office in Jammu and the couple settled in Delhi, where he began practicing before the Supreme Court. Mehta maintains that, for some time, he was the laughing stock among his colleagues for daring to plunge right in. And it is true that presenting cases directly to the Supreme Court seemed somewhat like climbing the Himalayas.

Mehta was about thirty-five years old when he met Radha, and she was about the same age, having also defied her parents who had wanted her to marry much earlier. The two met in New Delhi, where Mehta had gone to a Hindustani Andolan meeting at the Gandhi Peace Foundation. Radha, a believer in Gandhian philosophy, was also there, and the two fell to discussing the issues involving Jammu and Kashmir, which were of interest to Radha because she had visited Kashmir on a number of occasions and had witnessed the restlessness among youths in the valley. As their discussions intensified, they exchanged addresses and such, and met at other meetings. Eventually she did move to Jammu, but even then they were merely friends. "It was a meeting point of thoughts," says Mehta. They were friends for a few more years before they decided to get married on January 15, 1983, in Dehra Dun, Radha’s hometown. Later, they moved to New Delhi and in June 1984 their only child, daughter Tarini, was born.

In the meantime, Mehta had become interested in the case of 194 children being detained in jail in the state of Orissa. Through sources in the state, he came to know about the appalling conditions in which the children lived, with fifty or more crammed into cells in which they lived and ate, urinated and defecated, and where they were sodomized and abused by hardened criminals. Most of the children had been arrested for minor offenses, such as stealing fruit from roadside stands, and they were too young and innocent (and, no doubt, poor) to give their addresses and contact information to the police. So they were languishing in jail, often without their parents knowing what had become of them and with no one to defend them. Mehta petitioned the court on their behalf. When the case was heard, Mehta was not satisfied with the statement of the state government in response to the charges. He insisted that the court appoint an independent commissioner to conduct a firsthand investigation. Pramod Mishra, a social activist, did just that. His report upheld the truth of Mehta’s petition and verified the horrible conditions in the prisons where the children were being illegally detained. As a result of litigation in the Supreme Court, the children were freed by the government of Orissa.

In 1985, another case of child abuse came to Mehta’s attention, this one in Tamil Nadu in South India. It involved children working in match factories and the firecracker industry. Mehta went to Tamil Nadu to investigate and found that the children were being huddled together in buses as early as 2:00 a.m. for the trip to the factories. They were forced to work for twelve hours or more under extremely unhealthy and dangerous conditions and were paid two rupees, which Mehta says was "like two pence," i.e., almost nothing. Then they were crowded into buses back to their homes, where they could rest for perhaps three or four hours before being bussed back to work. Most of them were, of course, ill, and their skin was peeling off from the chemicals used in match making and the closed, stuffy conditions under which they worked. Again, Mehta went before the Supreme Court, this time pressing strenuously for a ban on child labor in the whole of India. After various hearings, the Court delivered a landmark judgment in his favor. It ruled to ban child labor completely in hazardous industries throughout India. It also mandated that children working in nonpolluting and nonhazardous industries be paid wages equal to those of adults and that they be insured and provided health and education facilities. The Court furthermore directed all state governments, as well as the national government, to undertake a survey of child labor and labor conditions and to provide rehabilitation and welfare measures for children who had been removed from hazardous industries. The Court also directed the government to create a child welfare fund at the national, state and district levels. When fully implemented, this historic judgment will benefit fifteen million Indian children.

Mehta filed both these public interest cases on behalf of children before the Supreme Court under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, which guarantees the fundamental rights of all citizens. By entertaining such cases, the Court has opened the door to redress grievances of even the poorest of the poor, if their fundamental rights have been violated. The Court can take a sui moto action on its own, or any concerned citizen can file a case under Article 32 of the Constitution for the enforcement of fundamental rights, which include the "right to life."

Mehta says that, in a number of cases, the Supreme Court of India has played a historic role in the protection of the country’s environment—not only through injunctive measures such as closing industries that cause pollution but also through remedial measures that provide compensation to the victims of pollution. Moreover, by acting on the presumption that procedure (as a mere "handmaiden of justice") should never stand in the way of access to justice for the weaker sections of society, the Court has expanded the concept of locus standi by rejecting the assumption of personal stake or injury in determining the right to file a case. Mehta points out that it is impractical to expect individuals who are affected, especially in pollution cases, to file cases on their own. Under this expanded understanding, any citizen or lawyer can file a writ petition or a public interest or social action litigation case for a disadvantaged group of people who, because of poverty or for other reasons, are not able to file for themselves. Mehta’s reputation as a lawyer, in the final analysis, is founded upon his success with this sort of litigation.

The case for which Mehta is most famous, that on behalf of the Taj Mahal in the city of Agra, Uttar Pradesh, was also public interest litigation. In this case, Mehta was accosted at a social gathering, organized to honor the parliamentarian Piloo Mody who had just died, by a man who accused him of being a lawyer, part of a greedy lot that made a lot of money but did nothing worthwhile. Mehta asked him what his problem was, and he said the Taj Mahal was dying and the government was not caring for it. This piqued Mehta’s attention—he himself had never been to the Taj before—and he began what was to become a long process of investigation and litigation. But he never met the man from the party again.

Mehta was developing a strong investigative methodology, and when he grew interested in the Taj, he started by reading—first, Mogul history, then books on the Taj Mahal itself, and then on environmental studies. Later, he visited the Taj with his wife Radha and a noted environmental scientist, Professor T. Shiva Ji Rao, and saw for himself both its beauty and its degradation. He saw how the majestic white marble "monument to love" reflected sunlight and moonlight and was, in turn, reflected in the river Jamuna behind it. He saw as well how acid rain, smog, and sulfur dioxide emissions had yellowed the fine marble, leaving it crumbling in some areas. He began to prepare his case.

Mehta devoted about six months to investigating industrial pollution in Agra and other nearby areas and more than two hundred hours to writing and rewriting his petition to the Supreme Court. He filed his writ petition in late 1984 on behalf of the Taj Mahal itself as well as other historic monuments located within the Taj Trapezium and also on behalf of the area’s residents whose life and health were deleteriously affected by the pollution. Since it was his first case for the protection of the Taj Mahal, a world heritage site, he took every precaution so that the Court would be convinced to take action against a refinery and other polluting and hazardous industries responsible for damaging the Taj and its surroundings. Mehta filed his petition under Article 32 of the Constitution. In his petition, he stated that the life of the "living monument" itself was under serious threat as well as the life and health of the people living near it. Thus, Article 21 of the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to life, was being violated by the state of Uttar Pradesh, the Union of India, and the industries causing the pollution. By this time, as a result of another Mehta case, Article 21 had been interpreted as having an extended meaning of "the right to a healthy life." (This interpretation was accepted by the Supreme Court in a case concerning the Ganges River filed by Mehta a few years after he filed the Taj case, but the Ganges case was settled before the Taj case was heard by the Court. This interpretation enabled several court decisions against polluting industries.) Mehta considered attempting to convince the court that the monument, too, had a right to life, since he was filing on behalf of the monument. But he decided he was more comfortable shifting his attention to the health and well-being—"the right to life"—of the people of Agra who lived in the vicinity of the Taj. For if the pollution was high enough to cause "marble cancer," it was certainly even more harmful to human beings. (Mehta was to point out later that India probably has better judiciary protection for monuments than almost any other country and does in fact grant almost human rights to such symbols of the country’s cultural heritage.)

Because it required rigorous scientific investigation, Mehta built his case slowly over a period of six or seven years. Finally, in 1992, the Supreme Court began to hear the case in which Mehta itemized numerous threats to the environment in the Taj region. There were, for example, a huge coal-based thermal power plant, a petroleum refinery, several iron foundries, hundreds of unregulated small factories, and a great deal of vehicular traffic. Mehta presented scientific data to demonstrate the impact of these pollutants on the marble of the Taj and also on the health of the people who lived and worked in the area. He was asking the Court to rule in favor of the monument and the people of the area. In a series of precedent-setting cases, it did so. To those not acquainted with Indian law, these decisions were regulatory in nature and imposed "best practices" on industries and local governments. The Taj Mahal decisions included:

• Restricting the whole trapezium (a 10,400-square-kilometer area that contained 255 monuments considered environmentally fragile) to motor vehicles using unleaded gasoline;
• Relocating or closing down the power plant and more than five hundred other factories;
• Installing pollution control devices at the petroleum refinery and other factories;
• Establishing a green belt of trees around the Taj Mahal;
• Ensuring an uninterrupted power supply so that diesel generators would not be used;
• Requiring the petroleum refinery to set up a fifty-bed hospital to deal with environmentally caused lung and other diseases;
• Constructing a bypass to direct heavy road traffic away from Agra;
• Distributing cooking gas and gas connections to ten thousand families in the area; and
• Banning any use of coal and coke within the trapezium and closing down brick kilns within a radius of twenty kilometers from each monument in the trapezium.

Mehta has pointed out that many of these measures, and indeed the whole case, served the good of the people as well as the monument. Generally, in pollution cases brought against industries, the workers’ jobs are in jeopardy; they may, therefore, actually side with the industries. But in this case (in fact, in all his environmental cases), Mehta took care to provide for worker protection. Indeed, before this case had actually reached the Supreme Court, it had already enunciated two important principles governing industries (again in a Mehta-argued case). First, the Court ruled that a company that cannot obey the antipollution laws has no right to exist. And second, it ruled that a company that cannot pay the minimum wage has no right to stay in business. Most of the closure decisions in the Taj case included the requirement that the companies continue to pay their workers while they were cleaning up to reopen. Here, progressive court decisions, combined with direct regulation under the court, truly function in the service of both workers and environmentalists.

But, in a sense, Mehta’s 1984 Taj petition was ahead of its time. In the years before the case was actually heard in 1992, several more pressing environmental cases came up, and the settlements of these cases helped create a judicial atmosphere that was more advantageous to the Taj Mahal case. Mehta also handled many of these cases himself, partly because his work on the Taj had attuned him to environmental problems and environmental law.

The first of these involved an industrial gas leak. In West Delhi in 1985, a group of forty children walking home from school were overcome by fumes from an open drain, apparently the result of a gas leak from the Shriram Foods and Fertilizer Company. Mehta filed a public interest litigation on the children’s behalf, but the registrar of the court did not agree to list the case for an early hearing, telling Mehta that it was not urgent and advising him to concentrate on his private practice rather than on public interest cases. Then the hand of fate kicked in. It was December 4, 1985. The winter was at its height in north India and Delhi was experiencing a cold wave. The nation was still under the spell of shock and grief cast by the Union Carbide gas leak accident in Bhopal just a year before, a tragedy that killed hundreds of people and injured thousands. At around 10:40 that morning, there was an explosion and a cloud of gas began moving across the city, carried by the wind and affecting hundreds of thousands of people stalled in a mid-morning traffic jam.

As this was occurring, Mehta happened to be waiting outside the chief justice’s courtroom in connection with another case of his, which was coincidentally being heard that very morning. At around 11:00 a.m. he noticed some lawyers running in panic. When he asked one of them what was happening, the lawyer answered that there had been a gas leak in Delhi and that he was worried about his children. Mehta immediately sensed that the gas might have leaked from the Shriram plant, but he was unable to verify this with the police or with newspaper reporters. Nevertheless, he managed to retrieve a copy of his Shriram writ petition from his locker before being called to address the Court about the other case. When his session with the Court was over—it was now mid-afternoon—Mehta mentioned that there was another case that needed hearing urgently. He then told the impatient judges about the gas leak, noting that the poisonous clouds were drifting in the direction of the Court and that the justices themselves were possibly in danger. The chief justice quickly verified Mehta’s story and asked, "What can be done?" Mehta was ready with his petition, which, he said, identified the very industry responsible for the leak. Based on Mehta’s petition, the Court immediately issued a notice against Shriram Foods and Fertilizer. Its swift action was subsequently lauded throughout the country.

The Supreme Court immediately appointed experts to assess the situation. The following day, the senior expert stood up and said that the factory had been inspected, had been found to be safe, and should be allowed to continue to operate. But when Mehta (who had been working all night) cross-examined the experts, they admitted that they had in fact noticed certain suspicious activities: a new wall had been constructed overnight and there was evidence that some chlorine gas tanks had been moved from one location to another. Mehta then produced sworn affidavits from the workers who had actually moved the gas tanks and produced the workers as well, who were present in court. The justices immediately understood the bias of the first group of experts and appointed three others, this time of Mehta’s choosing.

The Court subsequently decided against Shriram Foods and Fertilizer and required it to pay a large compensation package. Even more importantly, the case established the principle of Strict and Absolute Liability (now sometimes called "The Mehta Principle"). This principle, along with its corollaries, the Polluter Pays Principle and the Precautionary Principle (under which an industry is obliged to assess possible environmental damage before it happens and to decide any doubtful issues in favor of environmental interests), now serve as fundamental legal tools for environmentalists.

Shriram was a big and powerful company, so it may seem surprising that a then unknown lawyer, Mahesh Chander Mehta, was able to contradict court-appointed experts and swing the Court to the side of public interest. When questioned about the possibility of corruption within the Indian Supreme Court, Mehta admits that government regulatory agencies have a very "soft attitude" toward big business, often issuing warnings but never really enforcing regulations or closing down industries. But, he says, in contrast to this, the Supreme Court has been stricter in its enforcement of the law and has thus acted as "the savior of the people’s rights." When asked about special privilege in the courts, he says, "The Indian Judiciary is, by and large, incorruptible. There may be examples [to the contrary], but in my cases, my experience, I have not found anything wrong. If you come with clean hands, with honesty and with a genuine cause, even though the judges are conservative they can understand where you stand. They understand whether the person standing before them is saying something right or wrong. If the person standing before them seems to be genuine, committed, honest, and he wants something for the society . . . and if your case is very strong, then even the conservative judges will . . . think, and they will help." Whether or not Mehta might be called an idealist, this is the faith on which his environmental work is founded, and it has served him well.

Because of the Delhi gas leak, and its shock value to the court, the Shriram case was actually heard and decided within the last two months of 1985. In that same year, Mehta became involved in another interesting case, that of the Ganges River. The Ganges, or Ganga, is held to be sacred, especially by the Hindu population. Its waters are used for ritual purification and its banks serve as important cremation sites. But industries have long encroached on the sacred river and dumped their chemical wastes into it; city sewage had also been channeled into the river. In 1985 in Hardwar, Uttar Pradesh, someone carelessly threw a match into the Ganges and the polluted water actually caught fire. This was a huge fire, a mile long, twenty feet in the air; it raged for hours. Mehta, who had already undertaken the case to save the Taj Mahal, now took up the case to save the Holy River. This too would be long and complicated.

The fire itself was probably due to the flammable effluents discharged by one factory in the area. The initial case was filed against two industries and one municipality, but it grew to include thousands of industries and some three hundred cities and towns in the Ganges basin, making it probably the largest environmental case in the world. Eventually, it affected nearly the full length of the 2,500-kilometer river. Over and over again the case pitted environmental needs against development plans, raising important issues connecting these two imperatives. These included the right of workers to be paid even while their places of employment were closed down during the installation of court-mandated antipollution equipment.

In 1987, two years after the case was filed, the Court closed down twenty-nine tanneries along the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, setting the legal precedent that privileged environmental concerns over economic ones. Factory owners of course claimed the closures would result in lost jobs, but the Supreme Court ruled that neither industries that pollute the environment nor industries that cannot pay minimum wages have the right to exist. A year later, pollution control boards were legally compelled to monitor establishment of effluent treatment plants by thousands of industries and municipalities along the length of the river. In another decision, six hundred tanneries in Calcutta were relocated to a "Leather Complex" removed from residential areas and away from the Ganges River. These same industries were heavily fined to cover the ecological damage they had caused, under the principle of "the polluter pays."

But still Mehta is not satisfied. He says that many parts of the Ganges are totally dead, so that they cannot be used even for irrigation purposes, let alone for drinking or bathing. Now that so many industries have been relocated or closed down, 70 percent of the pollution in the river is caused by the cities and towns alongside it, which empty their sewage straight into the river. The towns say they do not have the money to set up sewage treatment plants, and Mehta points out that you cannot close down a city. At the same time, he argues that the people must be included in resolving this serious problem. But they have not been involved, even in the government-initiated Ganges Action Plan, which has been a failure. Mehta says the river is as polluted now as it was ten years ago.

Perhaps it was this ongoing concern for the river that got Mehta involved in environmental education. Since 1989, Mehta has taken advantage of Supreme Court recesses to do educational work, organizing Green Marches through various provinces, starting with his own native Jammu and Kashmir. He says these marches "create local awareness of developmental and ecological problems, besides eliciting cooperation from local volunteers." These marches, on which he is usually accompanied by his wife and daughter, have made a deep impression on people from all levels of society so that he is often referred to as "The Green Warrior."

Mehta also pushed for court recognition of the Public Trust Doctrine, which is based on the principle that neither land nor resources are owned by the state or the government but are merely held in trust by the people. This was part of a ruling handed down by the Court in a case Mehta brought against a former environmental minister of the government who had taken over a section of the river and land around it for a tourist hotel. The Public Trust Doctrine imposes upon citizens themselves the responsibility to care for both land and resources, and it imposes on the state the responsibility to educate the people to carry out these tasks. Put into action, the doctrine has mandated radio and television stations to air at least seven minutes of ecological programming a day; cinema theaters to show two slides with environmental messages before every film showing; and schools to require students to take an environmental course every year through elementary and high school and again in college.

In 1989, Mehta also joined with some of the top scientists of India and one former Supreme Court justice, P. N. Bhagwati, to found the Indian Council on Enviro-Legal Action (ICELA). Dr. G. D. Agrawal, an environmental engineer who helped Mehta with the Shriram gas leak case, was one of the first organizers and is, in Mehta’s words, "a very committed and honest scientist." The two men thought such an organization would make it possible to spread out the responsibility for environmental protection. They sought to take direct action and train people to work for the environment with tree-planting programs and such, but also to encourage young lawyers to pay attention to these concerns.

ICELA’s work requires a lot of time and many of the tasks still fall on Mehta, who has a long history of doing many things at once. The organization is strongest in Jammu and Kashmir, but it has also run workshops and programs in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Bombay, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh, and has filed cases in many provinces. "We could create chapters all over the country overnight," Mehta says. But he prefers to keep the organization centered in Jammu and Kashmir, where he knows the people well and trusts them. "We are very choosy," he says, "because if we take in some lawyers and they start working for the industry, it is a very sensitive thing . . . unless we have full faith in them. You have to resist the moment of temptation to your greed. Many times in my life, people have come with 20 million rupees. Once they came in vehicles and said ‘[The money] is outside. You take it and just don’t oppose us. That’s all.’"

Mehta has a history of disliking organizations, even NGOs, because people can be so tempted by money, prestige, and official privilege of any kind. ICELA, he says, is not only nongovernmental but non-funded altogether, because, if there are funds, then "who’s going to keep accounts, and this and that and so many things?"

Mehta’s own livelihood is modest and is supplied by the few cases he accepts for pay. But he knows the difference between need and greed and says God has always supplied his needs. He says there have been times when he did not have the money to pay his staff, and then at the crucial hour a client has come in and given him money, but only in the exact amount needed to pay the staff. His staff, incidentally, is small and made up of longtime friends and his landlady, who is also a lawyer and his wife’s good friend. He holds office in his house and generally answers his own telephone.

Mehta continues to work for environmental causes. In 1994, he filed a writ petition on behalf of the people in the coastal villages of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa, who were being adversely affected by big local and multinational companies that had set up prawn farms. These farms destroy mangroves and other natural features of coastal land, leaving it unprotected and infertile and destroying the traditional livelihoods of coastal villagers—all for the benefit of large companies whose products are exported almost entirely to the United States. In another landmark decision in 1996, the Supreme Court banned all industrial and construction activity within five hundred meters of the high-tide line and, again, held the polluters financially responsible for eco-restoration.

In another important case, Mehta got the Court to hand down a decision requiring all gasoline-powered vehicles to use unleaded gas, in an effort to clean the air of India’s big cities. Implementation of this regulation is still a controversial issue in India, but the decision, at least, clearly favors the environment.

Mehta is happy that in his legal career, mostly devoted to environmental cases, he has succeeded in adding several important principles to the law of the land:

• The broadening of the scope of the Right to Life concept, as guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution, to include the right to clean water, clean air, and a healthy environment;
• The Principles of Absolute Liability and the Polluter Must Pay;
• The Precautionary Principle;
• The understanding that environmental concerns take precedence over employment possibilities, and that an industry that cannot control pollution has no right to exist;
• The understanding that an industry that cannot pay the minimum wage has no right to exist; and
• The Public Trust Doctrine.

But one would be mistaken in concluding that he is biased against industry and development. "I am not opposed to development," he says. "All I am saying is that public health and welfare should not be destroyed in the name of development. There is absolutely no problem with industries being set up, but the industries should comply with the pollution control laws of the land."

Concerned friends have, however, urged him on many occasions to hire a bodyguard or a security guard at home, as he has alienated many industrial interests. He is not overly concerned about his safety, however, although he does admit to having received harassing phone calls and such. Although Mehta’s influence has been widespread and he is a force to be reckoned with in India today, he has no political ambitions, at least at the present time. He considers politics "messy" and confusing and seems to have found in the law the most effective way for him to make his influence felt.

But he does wish to do more with the education and guidance of young lawyers, so that more of them will go into environmental law—and keep to the high road instead of giving in to the temptations often dangled before lawyers. Aside from many articles, Mehta has written a book dealing with environmental law and his case experience in the field, as a sort of a handbook for young lawyers.

Mehta has one enduring dream. This is to open an ashram / legal institution dedicated to both environmentally sound living and using the law as an instrument for environmental protection. What he has in mind is a simple place with mud huts and organic farming. He wants people from all over Asia to come and live there. Indeed, lawyers from all over the world have expressed an interest in such a project and promised to spend some time living and working there when it is ready. Mehta thinks this is the best way to pass on his hard-fought legacy.

Susan P. Evangelista

REFERENCES

Behl, Vinod, and Onkar Singh. "The Green Crusader." Sunday Observer, March 13–19, 1994.

"Delhi’s Green Warrior." Asiaweek, August 25, 1995.

"Going Green with a Vengeance." Economic Times, n. d. Photocopy at the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila.

Mehta, Mahesh Chander. "Harnessing the Law to Clean Up India." Interview. Multinational Monitor, July–August 1995.

_________. Interview by James R. Rush. September 1, 1997. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. Manila.

Singh, Vir. "Environment: Bringing the Polluters to Justice." Earth Times/Asia, February 16–28, 1997.

Various interviews and correspondence with individuals familiar with Mahesh Chander

Mehta and his work; other sources including Indian Supreme Court reports and these websites:

www.liberalsindia.com/