On February 17, 2026, the Supreme Court of India delivered a crucial judgment for environmental jurisprudence, quashing a Punjab and Haryana High Court order that had validated retrospective environmental and land-use approvals for a heavily polluting industry. A Bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta ruled in favor of a 93-year-old environmentalist who challenged the establishment of a Shree Cement grinding unit in the Sangrur district.
The legal dispute originated from the company building a plant on land explicitly classified as a rural agricultural zone under the statutory Master Plan. Despite this existing land-use designation, the state granted a Change of Land Use (CLU) permission for industrial activity in December 2021, followed immediately by environmental consent. When local residents, agriculturists, and a nearby school filed a writ petition highlighting the statutory violations, the Town and Country Planning Department attempted to cure the defect by issuing an ex post facto (retroactive) approval during the pendency of the litigation.
The Supreme Court fundamentally rejected this administrative maneuver. The Justices held that under the Punjab Regional and Town Planning and Development Act, 1995, an administrative action that lacks legal backing at the time of its issuance cannot be retrospectively cured by a subsequent approval unless the parent statute expressly grants the power of retrospective regularization. Because the Act contained no such provision, the ex post facto clearance was deemed a nullity.
This ruling is particularly significant given the Supreme Court's broader, oscillating stance on retrospective environmental clearances. While a recent controversial 2:1 ruling in the Vanashakti case had temporarily revived the possibility of ex post facto clearances to prevent economic fallout for massive infrastructure projects, the February 17 ruling strictly enforces the principle that statutory land-use laws cannot be bypassed via administrative fiat. The Court emphasized that subsequent regulatory shifts cannot be utilized to legitimize permissions that were fundamentally unlawful at inception.
Source: Babushahi