ABSTRACT
This paper examines whether Indian constitutional law can recognise rivers as rights-bearing legal persons, and whether such recognition offers a workable response to the continuing failure of conventional environmental regulation. The question has acquired practical significance following the Uttarakhand High Court's decisions in Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand and Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand, where the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, along with connected ecological systems, were declared juristic persons. Those decisions marked a significant doctrinal departure by attempting to move rivers from the category of protected resources to that of legal subjects. The paper evaluates the constitutional basis, institutional feasibility, and doctrinal coherence of that shift.
The analysis begins by locating the legal personality of rivers within the broader jurisprudence of legal personality, earth jurisprudence, and environmental constitutionalism. It argues that while Indian law has historically recognised non-human juristic persons, such as idols and trusts, the extension of that principle to rivers requires a stronger constitutional foundation than existing doctrine presently provides. The paper then examines the constitutional and statutory framework governing environmental protection in India, particularly Articles 21, 48A, and 51A(g), and demonstrates that these provisions support environmental protection but do not clearly establish rivers as bearers of rights.
Through a critical reading of the Uttarakhand decisions and the Supreme Court's subsequent stay order, the paper identifies major doctrinal and institutional gaps in the judicial recognition of river rights. It finds that the absence of a legislative framework for guardianship, enforcement, and definition of rights makes judicial declarations of legal personality difficult to sustain in practice. The paper concludes that although the recognition of rivers as legal persons reflects an important ecological concern, durable legal recognition in India would require legislative intervention rather than judicial innovation alone. Without institutional structure and statutory clarity, the declaration of legal personality risks remaining symbolically significant but operationally ineffective.
I. INTRODUCTION
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanack (1949)
Whether nature can hold legal rights is a question that has shifted from speculative jurisprudence into the working vocabulary of constitutional adjudication. The classical conception treated rights as the entitlements of persons, natural or juridical, and treated rivers, forests, and other ecological systems as objects of regulation rather than subjects of standing. That orthodoxy has eroded as environmental degradation has outpaced the regulatory state's capacity to contain it. Whether rivers, as living and ecologically vital entities, can bear constitutional rights is not a matter of academic interest alone; it bears on standing, guardianship, enforcement, and the structural relationship between environmental law and constitutional doctrine in India.
India sits at the centre of this debate. Through several decades of expansive interpretation, the Supreme Court and the High Courts have constructed an environmental jurisprudence anchored in Articles 21, 48A, and 51A(g) of the Constitution, reading affirmative environmental obligations into provisions whose text is, on its face, modest in ambition. The further step of recognising nature itself as a rights-bearing subject is conceptually distinct, and constitutionally more demanding. The Uttarakhand High Court's decisions in Mohd. Salim v. State of Uttarakhand and Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand carried this further step into Indian law for the first time, declaring the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, along with associated glaciers and ecological features, to be juristic persons with the rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.
This paper examines the constitutional and doctrinal foundations of those declarations, the theoretical premises that inform them, and the practical and legal difficulties they generate. The analysis proceeds in five stages. The conceptual framework situates the legal personality of rivers within wider jurisprudential theory and within the architecture of rights discourse. The legal framework section examines the constitutional and statutory regime governing rivers and environmental protection in India. The judicial interpretation section critically reads the leading decisions and the Supreme Court's response to them. The critical analysis section evaluates doctrinal weaknesses and unresolved tensions before the conclusion offers reasoned observations on the trajectory of the law. Comparative material from New Zealand and Ecuador is drawn upon where it illuminates a doctrinal choice; the focus, however, remains on how Indian constitutional law can or cannot accommodate the legal personality of rivers.
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