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The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court has recognised Tamil Nadu's Thamirabarani (Porunai) river as a legal person entitled to protection against pollution.
The Bench of Justices G.R. Swaminathan and B. Pugalendhi grounded the personhood in the river being worshipped as a deity by Hindus, not in its being a river.
The personhood is deliberately narrow: it covers only the right not to be polluted, and creates no other rights, duties or liabilities.
Dumping of clothes and ritual articles is prohibited and is to be treated as contempt of court; ashes may be immersed only in unfired earthen pots that dissolve in water.
It revives a line of Indian jurisprudence begun by the Uttarakhand High Court's 2017 Ganga-Yamuna ruling, which the Supreme Court had stayed.
The Thamirabarani is a perennial river flowing entirely within Tamil Nadu. It rises at the Agastyarkoodam peak in the Pothigai hills of the Western Ghats, runs first northward and then eastward through Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi districts, and empties into the Gulf of Mannar. Unusually for a peninsular river it is fed by both the southwest and the northeast monsoons, which is why it flows through the year. Its tributaries - Servalar, Manimuthar, Gadananathi, Pachaiyar, Chittar, Ramanathi and Koraiyar - all rise in the forested Western Ghats. Karaiyar, Manimuthar, Gadananathi and Ramanathi dams stand on the system, and the river forms the Paanatheertham falls of about 40 metres near the Karaiyar reservoir, besides the Kalyanatheertham and Agasthiar falls near Papanasam.
Once personhood is recognised, the Court treated pollution of the river as a breach of the river's own right, alongside the statutory offence.
Freedom of religion is expressly subject to public order, morality and health; the Court used this to hold that ritual practice is no licence to pollute.
Fundamental duties to protect the natural environment and to develop a scientific temper were invoked against ritual dumping.
Prohibits the use of a stream or well for the disposal of polluting matter.
State public-health provision on the fouling of water sources, applied to the immersion of clothes and waste.
GS Paper II > Indian Polity: judiciary, fundamental rights and fundamental duties; GS Paper III > Environment and conservation
General Awareness > Current affairs, Indian polity and physical geography of India (rivers)
An entity that is not a human being but which the law treats as capable of holding rights and of suing or being sued - companies, trusts, idols, and now, for one limited purpose, the Thamirabarani.
Literally 'in the place of a parent' - an official or body appointed to act and speak for an entity that cannot act for itself.
A school of legal thought that treats nature as a rights-bearing subject rather than as property to be managed.
The classical Tamil name of the Thamirabarani, used in Sangam literature.