Q.Read the news report below (Supreme Court orders REL to pay Rs 300 crore to Dahanu farmers, pollution case) and identify: What is the case about? Who has been the beneficiary? Who is the petitioner? What arguments would the company/farmers have put forward?

This is a real 2005 news report about a Supreme Court order against Reliance Energy over pollution from its Dahanu thermal power plant. …

What the case is about: Dahanu, about 150 km from Mumbai, was once a thriving agricultural and horticultural belt known for its chikoo orchards, fisheries, and forests. That changed after a thermal power plant began operating in the area in 1989 — the very next year the belt suffered its first crop failure, and by the time of this report, roughly 70 per cent of what had been Maharashtra's "fruit bowl" was gone. Farmers and environmentalists blamed fly ash from the plant for contaminating groundwater and damaging the local ecosystem. The Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority had ordered the plant to install pollution-control equipment, but the plant — even after Reliance Energy (REL) acquired it in 2003 — still had not complied by the time of the report, prompting the demand for a Rs 300 crore bank guarantee.

Who benefited: the chikoo farmers of Dahanu, whose livelihoods had been devastated by the plant's pollution — the Rs 300 crore ordered by the Supreme Court was meant to address that harm.

Who was the petitioner: the Dahanu chikoo farmers (acting, in the spirit of this chapter's discussion of PIL, as the aggrieved and public-interest party bringing the pollution to the Court's attention).

Likely arguments — the company: that the pollution-control obligations were largely inherited from the plant's pre-2003 operators, that installing the required equipment needed time and a feasible technical schedule (which it says it resubmitted in 2004), and that shutting down or heavily penalising the plant would hurt the local economy and jobs the plant itself supported. …