Bangalore: In late March 2025, tens of bulldozers massed at the perimeter of Hyderabad Central University (HCU) in Telangana. Their target was a 400-acre expanse of scrub jungle and rocky hills that had regenerated into a vibrant forest over decades.
Students and faculty rushed to form human barricades to prevent the clearance. Despite protests, nearly 10,000 of the estimated 17,700 trees were felled under police supervision, before a Supreme Court judgement halted further destruction.
In addition to destroying one of Hyderabad’s last remaining urban forests, this action violated the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in T N Godavarman Thirumulpad vs Union of India (1996), which extended the protection of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 (FCA) to all areas meeting the dictionary definition of "forest," irrespective of legal ownership or classification.
By clearing the forest for potential commercial use—without even getting it cleared from the union environment ministry, as the law requires—the Telangana state government headed by Congress chief minister Revanth Reddy bypassed the legal principle that ecological value, not land title, should determine environmental protection.
The confrontation at HCU was not an isolated land dispute or example of campus unrest. It revealed a larger pattern across India: a disjunct between environmental law and environmentalism practiced by communities who depend on land, water, and forests for survival.
While environmental laws claim to safeguard forests and promote sustainable development, their application increasingly facilitates dispossession through procedural legality and dilution of legal protections.
Similar tensions are visible across India: from the Great Nicobar infrastructure project to solar parks in Rajasthan; from the displacement caused by the Sardar Sarovar dam to the resistance against the POSCO steel project in Odisha; and the protests against the Kudankulam nuclear plant.
Each of these cases confirms a deeper rupture between a legal framework oriented around management and clearance, and an environmentalism rooted in survival, community, and justice.
This pattern resulted in India losing about 668,400 hectares of forest between 2015 and 2020. That’s nearly four-and-a-half times the area of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, India’s largest urban agglomeration.
It is a pattern that has been established by the union government in New Delhi and is being followed by the states, regardless of which party is in power.
In December 2024, Article 14 reported how the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had violated three Supreme Court orders and the law between February and September 2024, to clear 56 proposals to cut prime, natural forests for mines, roads, power plants and other ‘development’ projects, and allow ‘compensatory afforestation’ in areas that are already forests.
A seemingly deliberate misinterpretation and misapplication of the law by allowing this twice-over-loss of forests, according to our analysis of the minutes of 26 meetings, accelerated India’s deforestation, second globally only to Brazil’s.
In August 2024, Article 14 reported how the Forest Survey of India claimed India gained 2,660 sq km of forest cover between 2010 and 2020, while international organisations, such as Global Forest Watch, say the country has lost thousands of sq km of forests.
The misleading methodology used—classifying parks, plantations and orchards as forests—disobeying court orders, and incomplete and inconsistent data call into question India’s ecological security and global climate-change commitments.
Such legal obfuscations were evident in Telangana’s Kancha Gachibowli.
The Hyderabad Dispute
The land allocated to Hyderabad Central University traces its origins to the Six-Point Formula of 1973, a constitutional compromise that sought to address the unfulfilled promises of the earlier Gentlemen’s Agreement safeguarding Telangana’s interests.
Although formal transfer of title was never completed, the allocation reflected a constitutional commitment to public education and the development of Telangana.
Currently, the issue is who owns this 400-acre tract adjoining the university. The Telangana state government insists it is theirs, pointing to a court judgment that a missing land deed from the 1970s means the “revenue land” was never officially transferred to HCU.
HCU students recall that the land was part of the original campus grant—an understanding upheld for decades—during which time the university community allowed the patch to regenerate into a vibrant forest.
The Telangana government’s claim runs directly counter to T N Godavarman, because the FCA applies to all land that fits the dictionary meaning of forest, regardless of its ownership or legal classification.
Over the years, the land has become home to 734 species of flowering plants, 10 species of mammals, 15 species of reptiles and about 220 species of birds.
To the government, HCU’s lengthy stewardship in protecting these diverse species does not appear to matter on paper.
A Rapid Escalation
Armed with a 2022 high court verdict (upheld in 2022 by the Supreme Court) which confirmed the state’s title, the Telangana government rolled in the earthmovers, aiming to auction plots to IT companies as part of Hyderabad’s ever-expanding tech corridor.
Soon, the confrontation between the state and the students escalated rapidly. Criminal cases were registered against 54 students under section 107—attachment, forfeiture or restoration of property—of the Bharatiya Nyay Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, over 50 students were detained in one weekend, and an effigy of the chief minister was burned.
In response to national criticism, the government said it would convert all 2,000 acres of the area, including the existing campus, into one of the world’s largest eco-parks.
It took a suo motu intervention by the Supreme Court on 3 April 2025 and public outcry, to pause the bulldozers and force a rethink—even as a legal petition to declare the land a protected forest under the FCA was pending at the Telangana High Court.
If such a land takeover could be attempted in a central university established over 50 years ago, what resistance can far more vulnerable villages and forests offer?
Environmentalism For Whom?
In theory, India has several statutes that protect the environment and promote ‘ecologically balanced sustainable development’ and a Constitution that mandates environmental care, especially under Article 51A(g), which places a duty on citizens “to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures”.
However, as environmental law and justice scholar Arpitha Kodiveri documented in 2024, much of India’s early environmental laws around forest governance in particular were a colonial inheritance, brought in to extract and license off forest land under a veneer of legality, dispossessing countless forest dwellers in the process.
In 2023, the Modi government passed the Forest Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2023, or FCAA, which has undermined landmark Supreme Court judgements (see here and here) that protect forests, and allow their commercial exploitation.
With the FCAA, infrastructural projects in forest areas are effectively exempt from environmental scrutiny. Further, under the new Forest Rules (or the Van Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan Rules, 2023) these would not even count as encroachments.
In 2020 a draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) notification—although technically not implemented yet—did away with the requirement of public consultations for major infrastructure projects.
Indeed, over the last five years, the union government has made over 100 changes in the Environment Impact Assessment Notification of 2006, including attempts to bring in the unapproved provisions of the draft EIA notification of 2020 within its fold, as it significantly waters down the requirement of public consultations.
Admittedly, public consultations for such projects were often not conducted (see here for some examples). However, it appears clear that through the current legal landscape, public consultations are eroded by design, and sideline the very people these institutions are meant to serve.
Beyond Broken Law & Policy
The HCU saga spotlights a question that often goes unasked in India’s official environmental discourse: environmentalism for whom?
Mainstream environmentalism in India prioritises legality and conservation rhetoric over lived experience, even when the measurements for these are not based on any scientific evidence.
For instance, in 2019, on a petition by conservation groups, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of about eight million tribal and other forest dwelling people under the Forest Rights Act, which requires proof of ancestral link to the land to avoid evictions.
It was only when the ministry of tribal affairs expressed due process concerns that this order was stayed. According to Julie Koch, the then Director of International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, an advocacy, “The irony is that by implementing this old-fashioned and dangerous conservation viewpoint, indigenous peoples are seen as a problem rather than a part of the solution to protect and maintain the forests.”
This is also the context of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, which sought to create human-free zones, and evicted forest dwelling communities without adequate rehabilitation.
When Adivasi communities protest a dam or a mine, their actions are criminalised—even killed—even though they are environmental defenders.
This reality reveals a divide: on one side, survival-based environmentalism rooted in land, livelihood, and community; on the other, institutional environmentalism shaped by law, policy, and English-speaking authority.
The former is grounded and confrontational; the latter is orderly and acceptable to those in power. When they collide, the law consistently appears to favour the latter, preserving control rather than justice.
Development, Displacement, Destruction
Consider the Rs 80,000-crore project on Great Nicobar Island. The legacy of dispossession here is possible because the government used the tsunami-induced displacement of the Nicobar tribes in 2004, and turned it into a permanent exile, refusing to let them return to their ancestral land.
On paper, the Great Nicobar project promises strategic infrastructure: a port, an airport, 'smart roads, even a township. But environmental impact assessments (EIA) for the project were rushed and opaque, as Article 14 has reported.
Under the blueprints lie razed rainforests and displaced Indigenous tribes—the Shompen and the Nicobarese—whose deep-rooted ecological stewardship counts for little in a bureaucratic system that treats the land as a blank slate for economic visioning.
Similarly, in the Thar Desert, solar panels glint under the sun where sacred groves once stood, effectively claiming the cutting of an estimated 700,000 trees is necessary to move towards ‘sustainable practices’.
While some solar companies have claimed they will plant trees to ‘compensate’, forests cannot be replicated—destruction of an ecologically sensitive forest with protected categories of trees cannot be compensated by unscientific, arbitrary planting of trees in another part.
For the camel-herding communities who live there, this is not barren land—it is memory, ritual, and livelihood. Farmers are already pushing back against these projects, calling into question India’s climate change pledges.
In February 2025, Article 14 reported how farmers are pushing back against solar energy projects, a cornerstone of India’s climate-change commitments but which threaten their sacred orans, centuries-old community forests, central to local livelihood and culture.
In the watershed Narmada Bachao Andolan and the anti-Pohang Iron and Steel Company struggles in Odisha too, local communities did not only object to the loss of land but resisted the erasure of entire ways of life.
The Supreme Court in 2000, cleared Gujarat’s Sardar Sarovar dam, which submerged forests, farms, and homes, while lauding its ‘benefits’. At Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, villagers who protested the construction of India’s largest nuclear plant in 2012 faced sedition charges, and in one case more than 380 court cases were filed against a single protester.
At Thoothukudi, also in Tamil Nadu, years of quiet suffering a Sterlite copper smelter exploded into mass protests in 2018, met with police firing (and killing 13 people). When locals rose up against pollution, the National Green Tribunal in 2018 ordered the plant reopened.
After years of litigation, the high court affirmed that environmental harm trumped corporate interest which was upheld by the Supreme Court.
In Gujarat, villagers have been protesting the auctioning of land without their knowledge, for exploration by mining companies. The area is rich in nickel and chromium—minerals critical for the electric vehicle industry.
A similar dynamic has played out in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district, and in Bastar, Chattisgarh, with tribals threatened for protesting these mineral extractions.
Land, Life & New Environmentalism
HCU, and the struggles before it reflect an urgent need and growing recognition that environmentalism must center land, life and equity. India’s National Forest Policy, 1988 and the watershed Forest Rights Act, 2006, institutionalised the principle that communities most directly dependent on forests must be at the heart of their protection.
Studies show that community-managed forests such as Mendha Lekha, Nayagarh, Pachgaon and several parts of Chattisgarh under such frameworks have often seen lower rates of degradation and better conservation outcomes compared to top-down management.
The ecological and social value of urban forests has also been increasingly acknowledged by government initiatives like the Nagar Van scheme, launched by the ministry of environment, forest and climate change in 2020 to develop 200 urban forests.
These green spaces, such as Pune’s Warje Urban Forest, improve air quality, mitigate heat, and foster biodiversity, illustrating that even patches of urban wilderness serve critical environmental and public health functions
The knowledge systems of Adivasi communities—whose regenerative practices have long safeguarded ecosystems—have received legal backing through landmark judgments like the Supreme Court’s 2013 Niyamgiri verdict, which upheld the Dongria Kondh’s right to veto mining projects threatening their sacred forests.
Research consistently indicates that indigenous stewardship leads to stronger environmental outcomes and furthers climate resilience
These examples, the resistance at HCU and movements before show that development projects must be measured not by how swiftly they are built but by how justly they uplift all stakeholders, human and non-human.
India's environmental future depends on whether we uphold frameworks that recognise communities and ecosystems as rightful stakeholders, an approach rooted not only in ethics but in law, policy, and lived experience or continue the pattern of dispossession and exclusion that undermines justice and care.
(Atreyo Banerjee co-leads Environmental Justice Innovation at Agami, an NGO. Shardha Rajam works on labour and migration issues as part of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development. They are both based out of Bengaluru.)
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