Discipline the Regulator, Do Not Become It: The Jojari Test for Judicial Activism

When the Court Rebukes the Regulator, Who Does the Work? The Supreme Court is

angry with Rajasthan and it has every reason to be. For more than a decade, effluent from textile-dyeing and steel units in Jodhpur, Pali and Balotra has run into the Jojari, Luni and Bandi rivers, endangering about 20 lakh people.

A PIL warned the State in 2011. The Court's own suo motu case did not begin with a regulator's report. It began with a YouTube documentary. That raises the real question. The Court must act. The harder question is how it acts so that the river is still being looked after in ten years.

What the

Court has rightly done - Named the failure. Its oversight committee, chaired by Justice Sangeet Lodha, found toxic liquid being dumped through concealed underground conduits. Treatment plants were underused. By the State's own reported submissions, sewage capacity covered only about half the load in the three towns.

• Drawn hard lines. No construction within 100 metres of the rivers and no hazardous industry within 500 metres of their course or flood lines.
• Pointed at the State itself. Justice Sandeep Mehta observed that Rajasthan could be held liable under the polluter pays principle. That is the right response when officials regularise mining leases in areas where they knew illegal mining was going on.

Where the

risk lies Every time the Court creates a new committee to do what the Rajasthan State Pollution Control Board should have done, the Board becomes less necessary. That matters because the Water Act of 1974 already gives the Board the powers it needs: consent to operate, inspection and closure.

What it lacked was the will, the staff or independence from the industries it regulates. A court-appointed committee can produce excellent reports. It cannot inspect thousands of outlets every week for twenty years and it was never meant to.

There is a warning sign inside this very case. The Court had stayed a 2022 NGT order imposing ₹2 crore penalties on RIICO and the municipal bodies. According to commentary on the case, Rajasthan's officials read that stay as permission to do nothing.

A court's intervention, however well meant, gave a negligent regulator a reason to wait.

The better model Tamil Nadu's experience with the Noyyal river at Tiruppur shows the alternative.

The Madras High Court did not run the textile cluster. It set an unambiguous standard, zero liquid discharge and held the regulator and the industry to it. Tiruppur became India's first textile cluster to achieve ZLD and the capacity it built stayed with the State.