Courts and Solid Waste Management in Urban Areas

This chapter examines the invocation of the meta-narrative of the environment in urban governance and solid waste management. It outlines key interventions by the Supreme Court of India resulting in the framing of rules governing solid waste management. It then explores the implications of public interest litigation (PIL). It draws on a particular PIL concerning the informal plastic waste recycling market of Delhi. The chapter uses this to set out an empirical critique of law in action. It explores the PIL’s workings as process, as providing a solution, and as resulting in specific policy and practice. The chapter concludes by pointing to the dangers of the judiciary using the trope of the environment to exercise fiat via the instrument of PIL cases related to solid waste management, not just to disproportionately disregard the well-being and livelihoods of the poor, but ironically, to the actual detriment of the environment.