T.N. Godavarman: 800 applications and a questionnaire test

A Bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi returned on 13 April to a familiar problem. Weeks earlier, the same two judges had disposed of the M.C. Mehta trilogy, dealing with the question of what the Court should do with a petition that has outgrown its prayer?

In Re: T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad was filed in 1995, over timber felling in Nilgiris, making it one of the oldest cases still pending before the court. The Bench acknowledged that it could no longer be wound up in a single judgement and instead set in motion a calibrated triage of more than 800 pending interlocutory applications. 

In their order, uploaded on 13 May, the judges argue that the objective of this exercise is to “reimagine and streamline” the proceedings, and address “modern issues”  within a “contemporary framework.” Such a framing concedes, in effect, that the proceedings have gone on for much too long.

From a sandalwood petition to a national supervisory docket

T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad approached the top court in 1995 with a limited, region-specific petition. A scion of the Nilambur Kovilakam, an erstwhile princely house of Malabar, he had witnessed the felling of forests in Gudalur in the Nilgiris. The wooded slopes had once belonged to his family as Janmam lands. They had passed to the State of Kerala under a 1969 abolition statute, and the State, in his telling, was failing to protect them.

Twenty years later, the petitioner passed away, aged 86, his original grievance unresolved. Thirumulpad once told an interviewer that he had been surprised by the sweep of the judgement. He has now been dead a decade. The petition that bears his name has outlived him.

The order of 12 December 1996 was the watershed. A Bench of Justices J.S. Verma and B.N. Kirpal redefined “forest” under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980. The term was to cover all areas conforming to its dictionary meaning, irrespective of ownership or classification. From that point on, the petition shifted from a regional grievance to a vehicle for nationwide forest governance.

Successive Benches used the petition to lay down regimes for Protected Areas under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. They policed the diversion of forest land. They oversaw the disbursal of compensatory afforestation funds. The Central Empowered Committee, originally fashioned as an expert body by an order dated 9 May 2002, is today formally constituted under Section 3(3) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. The ad hoc afforestation-fund mechanism the Court devised has since been overtaken by the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016. The petition’s legacy is, on the Bench’s own reading, statutorily embedded. Yet the file remains alive, and the IAs continue to multiply.

Why Godavarman cannot be closed like Mehta

Through judgements dated 11 March and 12 March, the same Bench had disposed of the three writ petitions filed by M.C. Mehta. Each carried between roughly 100 and 450 IAs. The Court completed identification, categorisation and transfer in a single judgement per petition. Fresh suo moto proceedings absorbed the surviving issues. The model was clean: dispose, recaption, move on.

Godavarman, the Bench finds, will not yield to that model. Three reasons are given.

First, the docket itself defeats one-shot adjudication. Over 800 IAs are pending. “Many of them for almost 25 years”, the order records.

Second, the issues are intricately interlinked. The order offers a worked example. An IA seeks to permit a Night Safari in a Tiger Reserve in the Aravalli region. That single prayer cannot be decided without first settling the definitional boundary of the Aravalli, the buffer zones of the Tiger Reserve, and the expert report on the proposal. Three pending threads converge on a single application.

Third, several issues raised in Godavarman overlap with suo moto proceedings already instituted on the same subject matter. To dispose of the parent petition without first mapping these collateral filings would be procedurally premature.

The Bench, accepting a submission of amicus curiae, Senior Advocate K. Parameshwar, has therefore parted company with the Mehta template. The chosen substitute is a preliminary information-gathering exercise. Its purpose is to render the eventual disposal tractable.

A questionnaire, a deadline, and a deeming presumption

The amicus has been directed to prepare an online questionnaire. Every Advocate-on-Record holding an IA in the petition must fill it. The form asks seven heads of information: the applicants; the proposed respondents; whether the IA needed prior leave; the category into which it falls; whether it has been rendered infructuous; the reason it cannot be remitted to the jurisdictional High Court or the National Green Tribunal; and any other particulars the amicus may require.

A complete paperbook of each IA must be uploaded with the response. The link is to be circulated through the Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association. Parties-in-person are to be informed separately. The deadline is 31 May.

A sharp consequence is built in for non-compliance. Where the AOR or party-in-person fails to fill the form on time, “it shall be presumed that the respective IA has been rendered infructuous and shall be dismissed as such”. The deeming rule shifts the burden decisively. Silence is no longer a way to keep an application alive. Without this provision, the questionnaire becomes an invitation; with it, every applicant must justify continued existence.

Once the responses are in, the IAs and any tagged petitions and appeals will be listed before the Registrar Court. That Court will assess, prima facie, three questions. Is the IA infructuous? What category does it fall under? Should the prayer have gone before the High Court or the National Green Tribunal? Fresh IAs filed in the interim will be neither numbered nor taken on record until further orders. The matter is to be relisted before a three-judge Bench in the week beginning 20 July.

Decentralisation, in principle and in fact

The order is unusually candid in diagnosing what it calls the “centrifuging” of forest matters of local and executory nature into the top court. The Bench finds that this has impeded “quick and seamless access to justice” through the decentralised structure of the High Courts and the National Green Tribunal. 

Independent observers had made the same point for years. Kanchi Kohli, an environmental law analyst, has argued that the Godavarman record points to a structural pattern. Where the top court is approached to mediate or reverse executive action, in her words, “the deliberations have remained centralised”. The Registrar Court’s mandate to test each IA for High Court or NGT jurisdiction is the operational expression of this diagnosis. If applied with rigour, it could mark the most consequential remittal of Godavarman material to the lower fora in three decades.

The risk runs in the opposite direction. The fresh suo moto proceedings into which Godavarman issues will be channelled will themselves invite IAs. The Mehta trilogy has already shown how rapidly new vehicles can accumulate satellite filings. The order does not address this. It anticipates that the categorisation exercise will throw up reforms in the manner of fresh IA filings, but reserves consideration for a later stage. The architecture of the next phase will be written only after the present docket is mapped.

The shape of the exit

Read together, the Mehta and Godavarman orders mark a deliberate doctrinal turn. The top court is rethinking how it handles long-running PILs. Continuing mandamus, once a creative response to executive inaction, has become a docket-management problem. It carries consequences for access to justice that the Bench has now formally acknowledged.

Disposal, however, no longer means dropping the file. In each case, surviving issues are being routed into fresh, narrower proceedings. The Registry is doing more of the sorting. The High Courts and the NGT are recovering some of the jurisdiction they had ceded.

Whether the Godavarman exit is genuine, or whether it reconstitutes the same supervisory enterprise under new captions, will turn on two later stages. The first is how strictly the Registrar Court tests jurisdictional fit. The second is how disciplined the rules of the new suo moto proceedings prove to be. The order of 13 April supplies the apparatus. It leaves the substantive choices for July.