Discuss the role of the judiciary in regulating air pollution during festivals. Is court-led regulation of consumer products sustainable governance?

By reading Article 21 to include clean air, the Supreme Court has become India's de facto regulator of festival pollution. It recently allowed New Delhi residents to burst only green firecrackers, and only for two days, at Deepavali [1]. This role is vital, but it cannot sustainably replace regulation by the executive.

Role of the Judiciary

• Rights enforcer: treats festival smog as a public-health issue under Article 21 and acts through PILs where the executive has not.
• Product regulator: in Arjun Gopal v. Union of India it allowed only green/reduced-emission crackers, and later refused to relax the barium ban [2].
• Time controller: limits bursting to fixed days, e.g., the two-day Delhi window of 2026 [1].
• Balancer: weighs livelihoods in the firecracker trade (e.g., Tamil Nadu) and tradition against the health of children and asthmatics [1].
• Catalyst for science: its orders pushed CSIR-NEERI to develop the SWAS, STAR and SAFAL formulations [1].

Is Court-led Product Regulation Sustainable?

Strengths

• Quick and rights-centred, and fills a regulatory vacuum.
• Produced a national standard: 30% less PM, or 20% less PM plus 10% less gases, than conventional crackers of the same category [1].

Limitations

• Expertise gap: the cut is only relative. Green crackers still emit fine PM and noxious gases [1].
• Enforcement gap: compliance depends on a CSIR-NEERI logo and QR code that the buyer must scan. Courts have no inspectors of their own [1].
• Unit vs aggregate: savings per cracker disappear if people burst more crackers in total.
• Ad hocism: new orders every year create uncertainty for manufacturers and blur the separation of powers.

Way Forward

• Write festival-season limits into CAQM's GRAP for Delhi-NCR and into city action plans under the National Clean Air Programme [3].
• Set absolute emission caps per cracker, and let PESO test samples from shops against their certificates.
• Encourage community displays in place of individual bursting.

Judicial action has protected the right to breathe where institutions fell short. Lasting clean air, however, needs science-based rules made by expert bodies, with courts acting as watchdogs rather than yearly administrators. Building festival controls into NCAP and GRAP would respect both tradition and Article 21, and advance SDG 3 and SDG 11.