India: Environmental Law

For many Indian businesses, the climate journey begins with a simple exercise: measuring their carbon footprint. But as India’s carbon market takes shape, knowing your emissions is only the starting point. A more important question then emerges: What do these numbers mean for business and what should we do next?

For listed companies, preparing the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) involves collecting data from multiple departments, consolidating performance indicators and ensuring that disclosures are complete, consistent and finalized within the reporting timeline. Companies must ensure that each disclosure is supported by reliable data, documented calculation methodologies and adequate records, with a clear basis for how the reported figures have been derived and validated. These requirements become particularly relevant as companies prepare for BRSR Core assessment or assurance.

Global warming driven by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and compounded by ecosystem degradation poses an existential risk to nations, societies and economies worldwide. For India, this is not a distant possibility but a present reality. As citizens of this country and stewards of its future, we are called upon not just to comply, but to lead, to adopt rigorous personal, communal and institutional measures to mitigate emissions, adapt to changing climates and strengthen resilience.

India generates an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes of plastic waste every day, of which a substantial share, approximately 10,556 tonnes daily, remains uncollected and enters landfills or the open environment. To address this, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (“MoEFCC”) has notified a national Extended Producer Responsibility (“EPR”) framework for plastic packaging under the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016, as amended from time to time.

In India’s legal lexicon, “nuclear power” is more than a technological marvel, it is a complex category of activity defined, licensed, and overseen by statute. Under the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, “nuclear installations” encompass any reactor, plant or facility in which radioactive substances are produced, handled or stored. The same atom whose controlled fission heats our turbines can, if misused has the power to detonate cities, as Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Homi J Baba and several notable scientists have warned us.

The Central Pollution Control Board (“CPCB”) has issued guidelines under the Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022 (“BWM Rules”) governing the collection, handling, storage and transportation of waste batteries across the country. The guidelines anchor compliance to the hazardous waste regime, prescribe chemistry-specific storage and transport protocols, and restrict who may operate collection centres, thereby seeking to prevent mishandling and illegal operations in the handling of waste batteries.

Customers, investors, regulators, lenders, and supply chain partners are increasingly scrutinizing how organizations manage ESG-related issues. Climate change, resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, human rights concerns, circular economy requirements, and governance failures are no longer viewed as peripheral sustainability topics. They have become core business risks.

Every metro station changes more than a commute. It changes the value of land, the economics of neighbourhoods and increasingly, the legal rights and obligations attached to them.

India’s green hydrogen sector is no longer being discussed as a futuristic climate ambition. It is rapidly becoming one of the most commercially significant infrastructure and energy transition opportunities in the country. As governments and industries worldwide intensify decarbonisation efforts, green hydrogen is emerging as a strategic solution for sectors where electrification alone cannot achieve net-zero objectives.