Legalising an Illegal EIA: How the NGT Wrote a New Law on Accreditation

NGT judgment allows unaccredited EIA consultants to prepare EIA reports, undermining the NABET-QCI accreditation scheme and the EIA regulations.

India's environmental clearance regime has rested on one premise: an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is only as credible as the people who prepare it. On 21 August 2026, the Western Zone Bench of the National Green Tribunal abandoned that premise. Dismissing Appeal No. 19 of 2025 and connected appeals against GHCL Ltd.'s soda ash complex at Bada in Kutch, the Bench, comprising Justice D.K. Singh (Judicial Member) and Mr. Sudhir Kumar Chaturvedi (Expert Member), held that an EIA prepared by an unaccredited consultant becomes lawful once an accredited consultant "owns" and "revalidates" it at a later date, even after the public hearing has taken place. In effect, the NGT has created a new procedure that the law does not provide for.

In the case of GHCL's soda ash plant, the EIA was prepared by CSIR-NEERI, which did not have accreditation for soda ash, the product GHCL proposed to manufacture. On 23 December 2022, NABET disqualified NEERI for six months for preparing soda ash EIAs without accreditation.  NEERI's justification was that it held accreditation for another sector: chlor-alkali.

The law is clear: only an EIA consultant accredited for a particular sector can undertake an EIA in that sector. The MoEF&CC's Office Memorandum of 2 December 2009 made accreditation mandatory. The OM of 18 March 2010 confined consultants to the sectors for which they are accredited. The NABET Scheme of 2015 warned of strict action, including cancellation, against consultants straying outside their sector. And on 3 March 2016 the requirement entered the EIA Notification itself: paragraph 13 allows only consultants "accredited for a particular sector and the category of project for that sector" to prepare the EIA and appear before the Expert Appraisal Committee. Accreditation is not merely advisory or a guideline; it is legally mandatory.

In this case, NEERI, despite having no accreditation for soda ash, prepared  the EIA report, presented it to the public during the public consultation process, and also appeared  before the EAC. 

The NGT condoned the illegality in the following words:

"Once the data/EIA report prepared by CSIR-NEERI has been re-verified and re-validated by T R Associates, the ownership of the entire EIA report along-with addendum gets shifted to T R Associates who was an accredited consultant." [Para 309 of the Judgment]

The Tribunal reasoned that because an accredited firm had "verified" NEERI's data, 

"it cannot be said that the studies for preparation of EIA Report were not conducted… by QCI-NABET Consultant." [Para 295 of the Judgment] 

Nowhere in the EIA Notification, the 2009 and 2010 OMs, the NABET Scheme or the 2016 amendment is there any concept of "ownership" of an EIA, or of an illegal study being cured by later "revalidation". The Tribunal did not interpret the law; it invented a route around it. Data collected by an unauthorised entity does not become reliable because someone else signs off on it later. If it did, accreditation would mean nothing: any proponent could hire a compliant consultant, gather convenient data, and then pay an accredited firm to "own" the result.

The Tribunal also leaned on NEERI's "national repute". There is no mention of ‘national repute’ as a qualification in the NABET accreditation scheme or in the notifications issued by the Environment Ministry. Reputation is not a legal qualification. The Tribunal’s judgment now means that an unaccredited consultant can undertake an EIA because of its ‘national repute’, despite not being qualified to do so.

The illegality does not stop there. The marine studies, on a coast where turtles nest, were carried out by CSIR-NIO, which NABET had informed in May 2012 that it could not conduct marine EIAs on its own, but only jointly with an accredited consultant. Its chosen partner was NEERI. The marine baseline data therefore came from an unaccredited institute working alongside a consultant that was itself unaccredited for the sector and was later disqualified.

The consequences reach far beyond the project under challenge, and far beyond Kutch. The judgment tells project proponents that accreditation can be bypassed, provided an accredited firm can later be found to bless the outcome. It tells NABET that its disqualification orders have no consequence for clearances built on the disqualified consultant's work. And it tells affected communities that the EIA placed before them at a public hearing need not have been lawfully prepared at all.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that courts and tribunals cannot legislate. Yet the NGT did precisely this: it scripted a new procedure allowing unaccredited consultants to undertake EIAs. In doing so, it overlooked previous judgments of both the NGT and the Supreme Court which made it clear that an EIA can be prepared only by an accredited consultant. In BDA v. Sudhakar Hegde, (2020 INSC 303) the Supreme Court insisted on a fresh EIA where the original had been prepared by a consultant who was not accredited. Similarly, the NGT quashed the clearance granted to the Aranmula International Airport in Kerala on the ground that the EIA had been prepared by an unaccredited consultant. The NGT, bound by both decisions, has done exactly what they forbid: it has scripted a rule of "ownership by revalidation" that neither Parliament nor the Ministry ever made.

So far in 2026, the NGT has dismissed every appeal filed by those seeking to protect the environment. The concern is not just the dismissal of these appeals; it is the dismantling of environmental law through judicial dilution. In the GHCL judgment, the NGT has propounded a new legal doctrine: ‘ownership by revalidation’.

Case Name: Vijaykumar Karsanbhai Gadhavi & Ors. Versus Union of India & Ors. Find full judgement below.