Author: Ms. Pramitee Singh, student, Maharashtra National Law University Aurangabad.

The Great Indian Bustard (Godawan locally) is one of the heaviest of all flying animals and one of the most threatened species. They inhabit the arid and semi-arid grassland areas of Rajasthan and Gujarat – areas which also happens to be exactly where the Indian state plans extensive deployment of solar and wind energy generation. The juxtaposition is not a coincidence; this is the fundamental structural tension at the heart of perhaps the most significant environmental case in Indian constitutional law in recent years. By the time the Supreme Court intervened on behalf of the Godawan, in M.K. Ranjitsinh and Others v. Union of India (2025 INSC 1472), the number of mature Bustards remaining was anywhere between 50 and 249 individuals, all pushed to the brink of extinction, not through one specific catastrophe, but the accumulation of individual instances of habitat destruction, fragmentation and death from overhead wires stretched across their range. The history of litigation and decision by the Courts to protect Godawan from the developmental projects in the region emerged with a 2019 Write Petition (No. 838 of 2019) the M.K. Ranjitsinh & Others v. Union of India (2024 INSC 280).

With this background, this symposium brings together four scholars, who examine Godawan from distinct but complementary perspectives, bringing forth different dimensions of the Godawan’s implications on Indian environmental and climate laws.

In the first post titled “Godawan and climate litigation in India” by Ms Chhaya Bhardwaj, she discusses several orders and decisions by the Supreme Court of India since 2019. She argues that the litigation movement to protect the Godawan by M.K. Ranjitsinh and others raises questions about the developmental model that India follows for its projects today. Although the petition to protect Godawan sheds light on the conflicts caused by the clean energy development in India, it is not a new thing in India. However, the origins of the petition help trace the systemic challenges in the design of frameworks furthering development in India. The fundamental challenge is that the current development design in India does not consider the needs of the local ecosystem. There is an exclusion of some entities (human and non-human) in the current development design, which continues to fracture the idea and design of sustainable development in India.

The second contribution, by Dr. Manini Syali, is titled “Integrating Eco-centric Jurisprudence within the Indian Legal System: An Analysis from the Context of the Godawan Judgment.” For Dr Syali it is the move which solidifies ecocentrism into Indian constitutional law. She sees the 2025 Godawan decision as an important jurisprudential innovation, by locating its reasoning within traditions of respect for the sanctity of all life and by utilizing a species best interest standard which registers biodiversity depletion as a violation of constitutional law, moving the principle of ecological preservation from a peripheral aspect of environmental law to its organizational axis. Her interpretation of the Court’s application of the polluter pays principle, which orders repair rather than merely punishing environmental damage, serves as evidence of a shift from a primarily penal wildlife law to a constitutional framework focused on ecological restoration.

The third contribution, by Mr. Saksham Misra, Assistant Professor, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies and PhD Scholar, Just Transition at Gujarat National Law University, is titled “MK Ranjit Singh Case and the Rise of Just Transition Litigations before Indian Court.” The author looks at the 2024 M.K. Ranjitsinh’s decision, offering a reading of protection of Godawan in the region, from the vantage of the emerging worldwide discourse on Just Transition Litigation. Using conceptual tools from Savaresi and others, he understands it not as an environmental rights judgement but as a climate rights judgment – the first before the Supreme Court and critical not of climate action but of its implementation. He surveys an increasing trend of just transition-related claims before the courts of India since 2015, particularly from tribal and pastoral populations in Rajasthan and Gujarat challenging the allocation of land for renewable energy projects on grounds of procedural flaws, failure to get free prior and informed consent and socio-economic externalities.

In the fourth contribution, “Godawan and the Public Trust Doctrine”, Dr. Manisha Banik, focuses on the Godawan judgment through the public trust doctrine. Her contention is that though not specifically stated in the judgment in the Godawan case, the principles of the doctrine can be found throughout the reasoning process adopted by the apex Court. In fact, the Court’s notion of the state acting as trustee of endangered species and their habitats and using M.C. Mehta line of cases for interpreting biodiversity conservation not just as statutory and but a constitutional duty uses the Public Trust doctrine as what Dr. Banik calls ‘a double edged sword’ both as tool to compel conservation and to balance with India’s treaty obligations towards a transition towards renewable energy sources.

The final contribution is by Ms. Apoorva Satapathy, titled “The Godawan Case: Ecocentrism in Corporate Duty and the Road Not Taken.” Ms. Satapathy centres on what she terms the judgement’s most overlooked innovation, that is, ‘mandating the integration of Corporate Environmental Responsibility into CSR under the Companies Act, 2013’. By pronouncing that social responsibility ‘cannot exist without environmental responsibility’, the Court effectively disrupts the fungibility of Schedule VII activities and elevates the cause of environmental protection to a normatively autonomous pillar of CSR. She deftly follows this framing, tracing the impact of this reform on the ecocentric shift in Indian Corporate law, arguing that it creates, though unpaved, a new road of directors’ fiduciary duty to the environment.

All five contributions, thus, together map the journey of the Godawan judgement, unified by a common recognition that a case involving a species of critically endangered bird in the grasslands of Western India has spawned a kind of legal reasoning that will shape the climate rights, species protection and state responsibility regime in India for years to come. The Godawan judgement not only provided us with a right against climate change under the constitution but also established a habitat for that right.