Single Member Bench of the National Green Tribunal: A Successful Experiment or a Failure?

The National Green Tribunal is a specialized body established in 2010 for protecting the environment, forest and other natural resources. In its fourteen years of existence, the NGT has witnessed ebb and flow but ensured to achieve environmental justice by protecting the legal rights relating to the environment and giving relief and compensation to persons and property. However, its environmental activism liked by the few and the executive time and again attempted to dilute the NGT Act, 2010 whether it was objecting NGT’s suo motu jurisdiction, allocating less budgetary allocation affecting the infrastructural facilities, lack of willingness to fill the vacant positions of judicial and expert members, controlling appointments, salary, terms and conditions of services through Finance Act, 2017 etc. Now in this list another challenge was put forth before the Green Tribunal i.e., Constitution of its single member bench by the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change in December 2017. This development came to tackle the crisis of existing vacancies of judicial and expert members in the different zonal benches of NGT and ensure functioning of the tribunal bypassing the provisions of the NGT Act, 2010 which requires at least two members of judicial and expert members to hear the environmental disputes. Therefore, in the light of the above development, this paper attempts to analyze the intentions of the Central Government to form a single member bench whether in consonance with the NGT Act, 2010 or not. Moreover, it will examine the role played by the Supreme Court of India in examining the validity of the amendment on establishing a single judge bench to check whether it exceeded or was within the permissible limits of the parent statute and to finally look towards its outcome.