A national movement for legal conversation

The prince and the four sights

Traditional accounts of the Buddha’s life tell of a young prince, Siddhārtha, raised inside palace walls and shielded from every sorrow. One day he went out into the city and saw, for the first time, an old man bent with age, a man suffering from illness, and a body being carried to the cremation ground. Shaken, he asked his charioteer whether this happened to everyone. It did. That shock was saṃvega.

Then he saw a fourth sight: a wandering seeker, calm and composed, who had chosen to search for an answer. That calm was pasāda. The prince could not return to the comfort of the palace. He left to find a way through suffering, and the search changed his life and, in time, the lives of millions.

The lawyer and the yellowing Taj

In 1984, a young advocate named M.C. Mehta visited the Taj Mahal. He found the white marble of India’s most famous monument turning yellow and pitted, damaged by pollution from industries nearby. Many visitors would have noticed and moved on. Mehta could not. That jolt was saṃvega.

His answer was pasāda, the clear sense of what to do. He turned to the tool he knew best, the law, and filed his first environmental case in the Supreme Court of India. A year later he learned that the river Ganga had caught fire because of industrial effluents, and he went back to court against the polluting factories.

Over the following decades his public interest cases led to hundreds of polluting factories near the Taj being closed, action against the pollution of the Ganga, and orders that moved Delhi’s public transport to cleaner fuel. In the oleum gas leak case (M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, 1987), the Supreme Court laid down the principle of absolute liability for hazardous industries. He received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1996, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1997 and the Padma Shri in 2016.

One shock, met with clarity and the law, changed how India protects its environment.