Constitutionalising Climate Protection in India: The Right against the Adverse Effects of Climate Change between Judicial Innovation and Legislative Silence

Abstract

The Supreme Court of India, in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024), read into Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution a right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change. The declaration placed India among a small group of jurisdictions in which climate protection has acquired an explicitly constitutional status, and it did so in a proceeding that was, on its face, about the survival of a critically endangered bird. This paper examines what that right actually contains once it is separated from its rhetorical framing. Adopting a doctrinal and comparative method, the study traces the antecedents of the new right in four decades of Indian environmental jurisprudence, analyses the reasoning of the 2024 judgment alongside the Court’s final directions of December 2025, and evaluates the right against the institutional conditions ordinarily required for a fundamental right to be enforceable. The central argument is that the recognition of the right has outrun the architecture needed to give it effect. Four deficits are identified: an indeterminate normative content; the absence of any standard of review by which state climate conduct can be tested; unresolved questions of causation, attribution and horizontal application; and a remedial repertoire ill-suited to polycentric distributive disputes. These deficits are aggravated by the absence of framework climate legislation in India, which leaves courts to derive obligations from executive policy documents that are neither justiciable nor stable. Drawing on Urgenda, Neubauer, Leghari and Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, and on the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 23 July 2025, the paper argues that the durability of the Indian climate right depends less on further judicial elaboration than on a statutory framework supplying carbon budgets, an independent expert body, statutory adaptation duties and just transition safeguards. Absent such an architecture, the right risks settling into a declaratory form: constitutionally significant, practically thin, and unevenly available to precisely those populations whose vulnerability supplied its justification.