Courts, Media and Civil Society in Regulating the Regulator: Lessons from Delhi Air Pollution Case
30 Pages Posted: 16 Jul 2009
Date Written: June 1, 2009
Abstract
Environmental regulation by the State in the developing countries suffers from problems of enforcement. Lack of information and public awareness are fundamental factors that allow the State to shirk. Under such circumstances who regulates the regulator? Informal regulation such as pressure from the civil society has limitations in developing countries. We argue that the success of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in India, as an effective method of enforcing regulatory standards, legally empowers civil society which makes information of State failure public and also binds the State legally to act, both of which the State cannot afford to ignore. We test whether the reduction in air pollution in New Delhi was due to the PIL filed and public information generated thereof, after controlling for other factors. Autoregressive distributed lag models and univariate structural break analysis show that judicial intervention and public information was effective in containing pollution levels.
Keywords: public interest litigation, information, regulatory failures, structural breaks in time series
JEL Classification: K41, I18
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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