India has just finished 176th out of 177 countries in the Yale Environmental Performance Index (EPI) 2026, ahead only of Laos, with an overall score of 22.46 against table-topper Estonia's 74.79. The country ranked 174th in environmental health, 171st in ecosystem vitality, and a comparatively less dismal 130th in climate change policy. This is not a one-off embarrassment: India also stood at 176th out of 180 countries in the 2024 edition, and its trajectory since 2014, when it ranked 155th, has been one of steady decline rather than improvement. What makes the ranking genuinely puzzling is that India possesses what many comparative constitutional scholars regard as one of the most elaborate environmental constitutional frameworks in the world. The gap between that framework and this outcome is the real story, and it says more about implementation than about drafting.

A constitution built for environmental protection

Unlike many older constitutions, India's was amended in 1976 to speak directly to the environment. Article 48A, inserted as a Directive Principle of State Policy, obliges the State to protect and improve the environment and safeguard forests and wildlife. Article 51A(g), a Fundamental Duty, places a reciprocal obligation on every citizen to protect the natural environment. Neither provision is directly enforceable on its own, but the judiciary closed that gap decisively. Beginning with Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of U.P. in the 1980s and consolidating through Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar and M.C. Mehta's long line of litigation, the Supreme Court read the right to a clean and healthy environment into the right to life under Article 21. By the 1990s, Indian courts had gone further than most jurisdictions, importing the polluter pays principle and the precautionary principle into domestic law in Vellore Citizen's Welfare Forum v. Union of India, and grounding the public trust doctrine in M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath. Parliament backed this with the Water Act, 1974, the Air Act, 1981, the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and, in 2010, a dedicated National Green Tribunal with the power to award compensation and enforce environmental law through a fast-track quasi-judicial mechanism modelled on nothing India had tried before.

On paper, in other words, India built a constitutional and statutory architecture that treats environmental protection as inseparable from the right to life itself, with an activist judiciary willing to enforce it. That is precisely why the EPI ranking should trouble constitutional lawyers rather than only environmentalists: the theory has not translated into outcomes, and the reasons why are instructive.

Where the architecture breaks down

The first fracture is enforcement capacity. State Pollution Control Boards, the frontline regulators under the Water and Air Acts, remain chronically understaffed and are frequently headed by officials with limited technical background, appointed and removed at the pleasure of state governments they are meant to regulate. The Comptroller and Auditor General has repeatedly flagged that a large share of industries operating under “consent to operate” certificates are never actually inspected within the cycle mandated by law. A right that depends on regulatory monitoring for its content is only as strong as the monitoring, and Indian environmental federalism has consistently underfunded that layer.

The second fracture is the dilution of environmental clearance processes in the name of ease of doing business. The Environment Impact Assessment notification of 2006 has been amended and diluted through successive office memoranda that expanded categories of projects exempt from public hearings, permitted post-facto clearances for projects that had already begun construction without approval, and shortened consultation windows. The draft EIA notification of 2020, though not fully notified, signalled legislative intent to further narrow public participation the very mechanism through which Article 21 environmental content is meant to be vindicated by affected communities rather than only by public interest litigants in Delhi or the state capitals.

The third fracture is compensatory logic replacing preventive logic. Forest clearances under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, and its 2023 amendment are increasingly approved on the assumption that diverted forest land can be offset through compensatory afforestation elsewhere, funded through the CAMPA mechanism. But compensatory afforestation rarely replicates the ecological function of old-growth or biodiverse forest, and CAG audits have found large unspent or misallocated CAMPA funds sitting idle in state accounts for years. The doctrine of sustainable development, which the Supreme Court itself endorsed in Vellore Citizens, has in practice often been read by executive agencies as a licence to proceed with development first and repair second, rather than as the balancing test the Court intended.

The fourth fracture is judicial enforcement at the remedy stage. The National Green Tribunal has issued strong orders on air quality, on illegal mining, on riverfront construction but compliance monitoring is weak, and several state governments have been found dragging their feet on implementing NGT directions, secure in the knowledge that contempt proceedings against a government are politically costly for any tribunal to pursue aggressively. A judgment that goes unenforced for years produces the same on-ground air and water quality as no judgment at all, even though it exists in the law reports as a doctrinal victory.

Why this matters for constitutional theory, not just policy

Environmental constitutionalism scholars distinguish between the “recognition” of environmental rights and their “realisation.” India recognised the right early and expansively; the EPI ranking is a blunt measure of realisation, and the two have diverged sharply. This divergence matters because Indian constitutional law has, since Puttaswamy, increasingly treated substantive rights as demanding structural and institutional guarantees, not merely declaratory ones the Court's own reasoning on the right to privacy insisted that a right without institutional infrastructure to protect it is incomplete. The same logic applies with even greater force to the right to a clean environment, which depends on functioning regulatory bodies, adequately funded monitoring networks, and enforceable timelines in a way that few other fundamental rights do.

What realisation would require

Closing the gap does not require new constitutional text; Articles 21, 48A, and 51A(g) already say what needs to be said. It requires, first, statutory insulation of State Pollution Control Board leadership from executive removal, similar to the protections given to other regulators, so that enforcement is not contingent on political convenience. Second, it requires restoring and strengthening public hearing requirements in the environmental clearance process rather than continuing to narrow them, since public participation is the mechanism through which Article 21 rights are actually asserted by the communities bearing pollution costs. Third, it requires binding timelines and automatic contempt consequences for non-compliance with National Green Tribunal orders by government departments, closing the gap between doctrinal victory and physical remedy. None of this is exotic; each element already exists in some other regulatory domain in Indian law and merely needs to be extended to environmental governance with the same seriousness.

India's constitutional framework for environmental protection is not the problem the EPI ranking exposes it is arguably the most textually explicit environmental constitution among major democracies. The 176th rank exposes a realisation deficit: a chasm between what the Constitution and the courts have said the right to a clean environment requires, and what State institutions have been funded, staffed, and empowered to deliver. Until that gap between recognition and realisation closes, India will keep producing landmark environmental judgments and worsening environmental indicators in the very same decade, and constitutional lawyers will keep having to explain why the two are not contradictory so much as evidence of the same underlying failure.

Author is an Assistant Professor at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR Campus. Views are personal.