Reconstructing the Public Trust: River Integrity as a Public Fiduciary Purpose in Indian Law

Abstract

Indian environmental law does not recognise or remedy cumulative injury to rivers that function as interconnected ecological systems and are understood as sacred through religious meanings, institutions and practices. Existing law regulates injury source by source, treats river degradation as diffuse public harm and assumes that orthodox public trust protects ecological interests. Neither fragmented regulation nor legal personality addresses cumulative harm, restoration or institutional responsibility. Through a cumulative-injury analysis of the rivers of Thrissur, Kerala, this article reconstructs public trust as sacred public trust. Protecting ecological integrity and restoring it where injury has occurred becomes a public fiduciary purpose; the river is the legally protected object of that purpose; the State remains the primary trustee. Temple-linked institutions incur practice-specific duties only where their legally structured responsibilities and material control extend to river-affecting practices. Sacred public trust treats sacred status as neither creating legal obligation by itself nor precluding secular regulation. Instead, it translates the authority and material influence of sacred institutions into ecologically accountable duties grounded in existing constitutional and public law foundations, and specifies which bodies owe which duties, what constitutes a breach, and which forum and remedies apply. It thereby addresses cumulative river injury without invoking legal personhood.

1. Introduction

India’s rivers are not merely polluted; they are being legally misdescribed. The Ganga, the Yamuna, the Periyar, the Bharathapuzha, and the rivers of Thrissur, Kerala, receive sewage, industrial effluents, solid waste, and residues of religious practice in volumes that reveal the failure of a regulatory framework organised around discharge control rather than river-centred ecological integrity. Successive governments have launched flagship clean-up programmes;1 courts have repeatedly intervened under Articles 21, 48A and 51A(g) of the Constitution; and specialist environmental adjudication has expanded under the National Green Tribunal Act 2010; yet the condition of the rivers continues to deteriorate.

Indian law protects rivers through a mixture of constitutional rights, statutory pollution controls, public trust, environmental principles and specialist adjudication. These mechanisms can restrain particular harms, but they do not organise legal duties directly around the river’s ecological integrity and restoration. That structural limitation, rather than an absence of environmental law, is the problem addressed here.

The resulting gap is a failure to register cumulative harm to the river as such. Article 21, environmental jurisprudence, remains human-centred, while India has no dedicated river-pollution statute and water is principally a State List subject (Rajamani 2007b, p. 285; Parihar and Bhullar 2025). Cumulative ecological injury therefore falls between legal categories directed to particular sources, human interests or public uses.

The question is neither settled nor dormant. The route that appeared to resolve it, the declaration of the Ganga and Yamuna as legal persons, was stayed by the Supreme Court within the same year, on recorded grounds that included possible interference with the rights of other States and uncertainty about responsibility for compensation in the event of natural disasters.2 What the stay exposed was not a defect of drafting but the absence of the governance architecture a change of status presupposes. The question returns to a body of law that has not resolved it.

The relevant unit is not ritual in the abstract, but the institutions that organise river-affecting practices—temple administrations, statutory boards and festival committees—may control riverbank occupation, sanitation, waste and ritual activity. Sacred practice can therefore have material ecological consequences without sacred status itself supplying legal authority (Jahagirdar et al. 2022; Joshi and Chakravarty 2025). The contradiction examined here is institutional rather than theological.

This article reframes the protection of rivers in Indian public law by attending to cumulative harms that current law does not consistently register in a river-centred legal form. It reconstructs the Indian public trust doctrine into a sacred public trust: a public-law fiduciary structure in which the protection of the river’s ecological integrity and, where injury has occurred, its restoration, constitutes a public fiduciary purpose; the river is the legally protected object of that purpose; the State remains the primary trustee; and temple-linked institutions incur practice-specific duties where their legally structured responsibilities and material control extend to river-affecting practices. The doctrine works through existing Indian fiduciary and constitutional framework rather than through declarations of personhood or through ecocide as a criminal-law route. It is disciplined by three constraints: institutional materiality, ecological translatability, and constitutional plurality that distinguish reconstruction from judicial invention.

The Thrissur case study exposes three linked limits: orthodox public trust does not itself make river integrity the organising purpose of trusteeship; legal personhood does not supply governance; and source-specific regulation is poorly fitted to cumulative injury produced by dispersed actors and practices. A fourth point concerns sacred status. It neither creates legal obligation by itself nor bars secular regulation. It becomes relevant where identifiable institutions exercise legally structured authority and material control over river-affecting practices.

Section 2 maps the Thrissur case study and relevant institutions; Section 3 identifies the limits of existing regulation; Section 4 reconstructs public trust as sacred public trust; Section 5 tests the reconstruction comparatively; Section 6 addresses constitutional limits; and Section 7 states duties, breach, standing, forum and remedies. Section 8 concludes.

2. Thrissur, Temple Institutions and Riverine Materiality

2.1. Why Thrissur

The rivers of Thrissur bear cumulative ecological injury for which Indian public law does not consistently provide a river-centred legal form. Solid waste, liquid discharges including ritual offerings, bank degradation, sand extraction, and the progressive occupation of riverbank and floodplain converge on a single river–wetland system across heterogeneous actors and occasions. Each component, taken alone, is subject to a regulatory regime. The cumulative injury they jointly produce is not, as such, the object of any single one of those regimes. The case matters because it concentrates, within one setting, the three conditions that make this gap structural: temple-centred ritual use of rivers; layered guardianship across State, local-government and Devaswom institutions; and ecological harm produced by dispersed practices that no source-by-source regime can capture. The question is whether the doctrinal materials available in Indian public law can register a river-centred wrong where the causes of injury are distributed across multiple actors and normative orders.

Hydrology determines the doctrinal stakes. The rivers of Thrissur do not behave as discrete channels. The Kole wetlands lie between the Bharathapuzha in the north and the Chalakudy in the south; the Keecheri and Karuvannur systems drain floodwaters into the same basin; and the wetlands serve as flood storage and as ecological zones sensitive to salinity (Das 2021; Sinta et al. 2019; Vidya et al. 2025). Injury to one channel propagates through the bank, floodplain and wetland into others. Source-by-source regulation, organised around discharges at single outlets, registers components of this propagation but cannot register the propagation itself. A legal form that treats each channel as the unit of protection misses the system in which the injury is borne.

The evidential basis is deliberately limited.3 The analysis does not treat Thrissur as representative of Indian river basins generally. Thrissur is selected because temple-linked institutional control, layered guardianship and dispersed ecological harm converge there. Its significance is analytical rather than representative: the case exposes a structural limitation in the legal recognition of cumulative river injury.

2.2. Why the Institutional Map Matters: The Heterogeneity of Devaswom Administration

Kerala’s Devaswom institutions are legally heterogeneous, so duties cannot attach to ‘Devaswom Boards’ as a single category. The five principal administrations operate under different statutory arrangements, jurisdictions, and accountability structures. The proposed doctrine therefore attaches practice-specific duties only where a particular institution has legally structured responsibility and material control over river-affecting activity.

The relevant administrations are The Travancore and Cochin Devaswom Boards under the Travancore–Cochin Hindu Religious Institutions Act 1950,4 The Malabar Devaswom Board under the Malabar statutory framework,5 The Guruvayur Devaswom under the Guruvayoor Devaswom Act 1978, and6 The Koodalmanikyam Devaswom under the Koodalmanikyam Devaswom Act 2005. Their differing jurisdictions determine which body can bear duties for particular practices.

The Vadakkunnathan temple, central to Thrissur Pooram, falls within the jurisdiction of the Cochin Devaswom Board.7 Other temples in Thrissur’s riverine geography fall within different boards or under independent administration, depending on location and historical endowment.8 The mapping of temples to boards is an institutional fact on which the doctrinal analysis depends.9

The Cochin Devaswom Board’s obligations in respect of the Vadakkunnathan Temple and Thrissur Pooram are therefore distinct from those of the Malabar Devaswom Board in another sub-basin and the Koodalmanikyam Devaswom. Each institution’s duties are calibrated to the practices it materially controls. Depending on the institution, those practices may include festival management, processions, temporary structures, waste streams, sanitation, riverbank occupation and post-festival cleaning. Material control is therefore necessary for the doctrine to apply to an institution in respect of a particular activity; religious character alone is insufficient.

2.3. The Five Patterns of Cumulative Injury in the Thrissur Rivers

Five legally distinct but ecologically overlapping patterns are relevant: solid waste, discharges, riverbank degradation, sand removal and encroachment. The question is not whether each source is regulated, but whether existing regimes can recognise and remedy their cumulative effect on the river system.

Solid waste is regulated by the Solid Waste Management Rules 2026 and, where statutory conditions are met, Section 24 of the Water Act 1974. Section 24(1)(b) can address matter operating in combination, but only within its specified condition concerning interference with flow and substantial aggravation of pollution. It does not by itself provide a general legal form for cumulative ecological injury at river scale. The evidence supports a limited proposition: deficiencies in waste management and sewage treatment have introduced waste into Thrissur water bodies, with associated ecological effects (Devika et al. 2016; Tom and Preethi 2025). It does not establish that particular festival residues enter specified rivers, and no such claim is made here.

Discharges into rivers in Thrissur come from three sources and meet three different legal responses. Industrial effluents and inadequately treated commercial discharges enter the rivers through outlets and bypasses, where pollution-control statutes apply. Domestic sewage and grey water reach the same waters from settlements without effective treatment infrastructure, where municipal and sanitation duties apply. Ritual discharges associated with temple practice, including oil, ghee, milk, curd, pigments, flowers, cloth, and ceremonial residues overlay the secular sources but fall largely outside pollution categories on the ground that they are religious offerings (Joseph and Tessy 2010; Jahagirdar et al. 2022). Intensified human and animal presence at major festivals adds further to the load (Sreekumari et al. 2016). The river receives all three; the law treats only the first two as pollution. The categorial choice to scrutinise some discharges and not others is itself a doctrinal feature, and its effect is to leave a substantial proportion of the discharge load legally uncategorised.

Riverbanks in current Indian law sit on the land side of a doctrinal boundary, governed by categories of title, planning, and public order that treat them as land adjacent to the river rather than as part of it. Hydrologically, the boundary does not hold. Banks and flood margins in Thrissur are repeatedly used for dumping, temporary storage, festival occupation, and unsanitary disposal. Pollutants deposited on the bank reach the channel through rainfall, run-off, and seasonal flooding. Human and animal waste, even when treated as biodegradable, contributes to bacterial and nutrient loading (Vincy et al. 2017). Festival structures intensify the problem: tarpaulins, scaffolds, and stalls may be authorised for a limited period, but authorisation does not remove their ecological effect. Incomplete clean-up, weak environmental conditions, and repeated occupation normalise the riverbank as event space (Meera and Vinodan 2025). The doctrinal partition between bank and channel produces a legal river smaller than the ecological one. The harm sits in the space between the two.

Sand removal is the activity for which Kerala has come closest to legislating in river-centred terms. Excessive removal lowers beds, destabilises banks, alters flows, degrades habitat, and accelerates saline ingress. The Kerala Protection of River Banks and Regulation of Removal of Sand Act 2001 frames the regulation in language directed at river condition rather than at discharge or licence, and the wider Western Ghats literature supports that framing (Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel 2011; Ashok et al. 2025).10 State policy has moved in the same direction, with restrictions on river sand mining tightened through successive instruments since 201611 (Environment Department, Government of Kerala 2024). Enforcement, however, proceeds through unauthorised extraction, licence breach, and revenue loss. The statute begins to register the river-centred wrong; enforcement returns the question to actor-by-actor scrutiny.

Encroachment, as a category of Indian land law, refers to unlawful occupation in a technical sense, focusing on title, planning, and flood risk. A different wrong runs alongside it: the progressive appropriation of riverbank, floodplain, and wetland space for human use, whether or not any individual occupation is unlawful. The pattern in Thrissur runs from repeated temporary occupation around festivals to permanent construction, road building, and development along river margins (Zainulabdeen and Nagaraj 2022). Temporary occupation normalises spatial extension into the river corridor; permanent development narrows the space within which the river can meander, flood, buffer, and recover. Encroachment disputes are litigated as conflicts between human interests over a contested resource. The river’s spatial integrity is not what the disputes are about and is not what the doctrinal categories register. Current legal categories do not consistently recognise this as a distinct wrong to the river’s spatial and ecological integrity.

These five patterns operate within a wider hydrological setting of wetland reclamation, quarrying, land-use change and altered flow regimes, which the Kerala scholarship and the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel report treat as requiring basin-level rather than project-by-project regulation.12 The Thrissur material is not a catalogue of five environmental problems but a single cumulative injury, of which existing law captures only the discrete sources, not the effect they jointly produce.

2.4. What Sacredness Does, and What It Does Not Do

The doctrinal task in this section is to specify the conditions under which the harm side of sacred categorisation becomes legally relevant without the protective side being mistaken for legal authority. Sacred status produces two opposed institutional effects in the Thrissur material, and the contradiction the section addresses is the gap between them. Sacred categorisation generates ritual discipline, local care, and the sustained communal attention that makes the river a focus of religious practice. The same categorisation generates intensified ritual use, concentrated festival waste, riverbank occupation, and a regulatory environment in which harmful practices escape scrutiny because they are framed as religious. Indian public law has treated this two-sided phenomenon as a single legal fact. It is two.

Two errors illustrate the cost of the single-fact treatment. The first idealises sacredness as a source of environmental ethics while disregarding the harm that ritual practice causes. The second treats religion as an externality outside the reach of secular regulation and misdescribes the institutional field in which obligations are already mediated, because temple administrations, ritual authorities, and associated communities shape conduct around rivers whether or not the law engages them. Both give a single answer to a question with two components: when does sacred status produce protective duties, and when does it produce harm-generating practice the law must address?

The proposed doctrine does not depend on a unified Hindu environmental ethics, and the diversity of Hindu temple traditions in Kerala makes clear why such ethics could not ground the argument. Śaiva, Śākta, Vaiṣṇava, and other traditions differ in their relationships to water, ritual purity, and ecological practices (Agoramoorthy 2015).13 The doctrine does not turn on reconciling these differences. It attaches to institutions that exercise material influence over river conditions, whatever the tradition within which the institution sits. The legal test is institutional materiality combined with ecological translatability, not theological identity.

Contemporary scholarship on river-temple practice in India supports the diagnostic claim of this section without supplying the doctrinal claim of Section 4, showing how temple-mediated normativity organises conduct around rivers in present-day Indian settings.14 It establishes the institutional facts on which the materiality condition operates; it does not establish that sacred status by itself produces ecological protection, and no part of the argument uses it for that purpose. This is the correction to the treatment of sacred status: sacred status, taken alone, neither creates legal obligation nor precludes secular regulation, and it enters Indian public law as an institutional and material fact through the conduct of bodies exercising material control over riverine practice. Section 6 develops the constitutional limits on the regulation of that conduct.

3. Cumulative River Injury and the Limits of Existing Regulation

3.1. Cumulative Injury and Its Legal Recognition

The cumulative degradation of an Indian river is borne by an entity that Indian law does not recognise as a bearer of injury. The legal form registers the incidents through the regimes that apply to each. It does not register the cumulative harm those incidents jointly produce because the cumulative harm has no addressee in the regulatory order.

The shift required is from harm-as-offence to harm-as-injury-borne. Green criminology and green victimology have enabled this shift, extending inquiry beyond discrete offences to cumulative environmental harm, state failure, corporate offending, regulatory tolerance, and restorative responses (Hall 2014; Nurse 2017; White 2018; Peacock 2025). The two questions the literature separates are who or what bears the harm, and what the harm is the sum of. The sum-of-incidents question is the one Indian regulation already answers; the bearer question is the one it does not.

In Indian public law, this shift provides the conceptual basis for treating restoration as a primary fiduciary obligation rather than a residual remedy attached to proven breach. Natali and Hall (2021) develop the underlying proposition: environmental injury is not addressed by deterrence, compensation or formal compliance alone; the legal response must address damaged ecological relations and the conditions that enable harm to recur. The orthodox Indian frame treats restoration as remedial because it treats the river as the medium of injury, not as its bearer. Section 277 of the Indian Penal Code, now Section 279 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, penalises fouling water so as to render it less fit for the purpose for which it is ordinarily used: the wrong is constituted by the loss of human utility, not by a violated interest of the river (Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, s 279).15

3.2. The Anatomy of Cumulative River Injury

Cumulative river injury is not the sum of discrete pollution events. It is the convergence of dispersed practices across heterogeneous actors and occasions, borne by a single ecological system, where no single source can be identified as fully responsible for the injury. A regulatory regime organised around discrete events at discrete locations does not readily accommodate a harm constituted by the convergence of many such events. The invisibility is structural: the law is not failing to see what lies before it, but is operating with a unit of analysis too small to encompass the object of injury. Five features make the injury structurally distinct from the events the regulatory order is built to handle. Each identifies a way in which source-by-source regulation cannot reach what the river bears.

The first feature is heterogeneity of legal status. Some practices are unlawful under existing pollution-control regimes; others are authorised, tolerated or socially sanctioned. Industrial discharges, festival waste, ritual offerings, sand extraction and bank encroachment are not subject to a single legal lens. Visible industrial pollution is treated as a regulatory breach. Ritual and festival pollution recedes into a protected background. The river receives both; the law scrutinises only one. The second feature is heterogeneity of institutional form. State pollution-control boards, local self-government institutions, temple administrations, Devaswom Boards, festival committees, industrial operators, sand contractors and individual users each condition the river. None is the single locus of cumulative injury. Each is a partial cause; none is fully responsible; and a regime that attaches duty only where causation is sole or proximate cannot reach the harm produced through partial contributions.

The third feature is temporal recurrence. Festival burdens, monsoon discharges, dry-season extraction and seasonal occupation produce injury that is not anchored in any single moment. Source-by-source regulation, organised around discrete events, is structurally mismatched to recurrent harm. The injury is not the event; the injury is the pattern of events the law is designed to scrutinise, only one at a time. The fourth feature is basin-wide spatial pattern, which indicates that the river is the wrong unit of analysis if it ends at the bank. The rivers of Thrissur sit within a wider hydrological system in which channels, banks, regulators, flood basins, and low-lying agricultural areas are interconnected, as set out in Section 2.1, and damage propagates into adjacent wetland and floodplain systems that sustain river health. A regime that regulates discharges at a single outlet cannot account for propagation through a basin. The fifth feature is irreducible relationality. The river’s integrity is constituted by relationships among flow, morphology, sediment, biota, bank stability, wetland connectivity and seasonal cycles. Injury to anyone affects the others. Source-by-source regulation—organised around outputs at single outlets—cannot register relational injury, because the unit of injury is the relationship rather than any party to it.

This yields the correction16 to the source-by-source assumption. Cumulative injury escapes source-by-source regulation not by accident and not through under-enforcement, but because the injury occurs at a level of aggregation the regulation’s unit of analysis cannot reach. Better enforcement of existing source-based regimes would not answer the problem: the deficiency is in the unit, not in the diligence with which it is applied.

3.3. What Indian Law Can Do, and What It Cannot Do, in Its Current Form

Indian law does not lack mechanisms to restrain river pollution. The difficulty lies in the juridical form those mechanisms take, which is consistent across constitutional rights, statutory regulation, and judicially developed doctrine: the river is the medium through which human interests are secured, not the bearer of the interests the law protects. The constitutional foundation is the combined operation of Articles 21, 48A and 51A(g). Article 21 guarantees the right to life, which the Supreme Court has read to include environmental conditions adequate to its enjoyment. Article 48A directs the State to protect and improve the environment. Article 51A(g) imposes on every citizen a duty “to protect and improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife” (Constitution of India 1950, Article 51A(g)).

Subhash Kumar exemplifies the bearer-medium structure. The Supreme Court held that the right to life under Article 21 includes the right to enjoyment of pollution-free water and air for full enjoyment of life, and that where pollution impairs that quality of life, a citizen may invoke Article 32 (Subhash Kumar v State of Bihar (1991) 1 SCC 598).17 The bearer is the citizen and the protected interest is the quality of human life; the river enters as the medium through which life is secured, not as the holder of the right infringed (Bhullar 2019a). The consequence appears in the disposal: the Court declined to examine the pollution allegations once it found the petition self-interested,18 leaving the river’s condition unadjudicated. Rajamani’s analysis of the Article 21 environmental right reaches a related but distinct conclusion: the right is so imprecisely defined across the Court’s multiple formulations—pollution-free environment, ecological balance, decent environment, humane and healthy environment—that it offers little guidance in making the value-laden judgments central to its exercise, and the principles meant to actualise it create “a smokescreen, which renders application and implementation difficult, and obfuscates the hard questions” (Rajamani 2007b, p. 285). The bearer-medium structure identified here, and the conceptual imprecision Rajamani identifies are mutually reinforcing: a right defined imprecisely, bearing on the river only indirectly through human interest, cannot fix the river as the protected legal object.

The Ganga pollution and forestry lines extend the Court’s supervisory reach without disturbing the bearer-medium structure. The Ganga pollution litigation in M.C. Mehta v Union of India deployed continuing mandamus to compel state and municipal authorities to control discharges into the Ganga, on the footing that the Ganga’s pollution impaired human use and public health.19 The T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v Union of India line does something the other lines do not. Reasoning that the Forest Conservation Act 1980 was enacted to check deforestation and the ecological imbalance it produces, the Court moved from that purpose to the scope of the protected object: the Act must apply to all forests irrespective of the nature of ownership or classification; the word forest bears its dictionary meaning; and forest land extends to any area recorded as forest in the Government record, whatever its ownership. Each State was directed to constitute expert committees to identify areas which are forests irrespective of whether they are notified, recognised or classified under any law, and a further committee to oversee compliance and file status reports. The legal forest was thereby made to follow the ecological forest rather than the classified one, which is the closest Indian analogue to the argument developed in Section 2.3 about the legal river and the ecological one. What the order does not do is reorient the purpose. The protected interest remains the maintenance of forest cover in the public interest, and the supervisory jurisdiction that grew from the line, which the literature has come to call continuing mandamus, is remedial machinery rather than a fiduciary purpose directed to the forest itself.20 The Indian Council for Enviro-Legal Action v Union of India line established the polluter-pays and absolute liability principles in the context of industrial pollution.21 None makes the protection of river integrity and restoration the direct organising purpose of the obligation; each speaks in the language of human entitlement and State duty.

The Water Act (Prevention and Control of Pollution)1974 codifies the bearer-medium structure in its very definition of the regulated harm. Section 2(e) defines “pollution” as contamination or alteration of water likely to create a nuisance or render water harmful to public health, to legitimate uses, or to the life and health of animals, plants or aquatic organisms (Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1974, s 2(e)); the operative prohibitions and the allocation of regulatory functions follow the same logic.22 Pollution is regulated by reference to nuisance, injury, use and harm, categories that locate the wrong in what the river fails to deliver to humans, not in what the river itself loses. The reference to animals, plants and aquatic organisms widens the protected interests but does not organise the regime around a public fiduciary purpose directed to the integrity and restoration of the river as an ecological system.

The 1986 Act and the NGT Act 2010 extend the regulatory and remedial apparatus without altering this footing, and the scholarly mapping of that apparatus confirms the structural point. The Environment (Protection) Act 1986 centralises standard-setting and empowers the Central Government to issue binding directions.23 The National Green Tribunal Act 2010 gives the Tribunal power to award relief, compensation and, under Section 15(1)(c), restitution of the environment. The scholarly literature has documented that architecture, its principles and its limits in detail (Ghosh 2019a; Gill 2016). Restitution remains a remedial category; it does not, by itself, define the underlying obligations through a public fiduciary purpose directed to river integrity and restoration.24

The public trust doctrine, on which the doctrinal reconstruction in Section 4 will turn, both expands the State’s obligations and contains the limit this section identifies. The passage on which Indian public trust doctrine rests is short, and it repays reading whole. At paragraph 34 of M.C. Mehta v Kamal Nath the Court states five propositions: that the public trust doctrine forms part of Indian jurisprudence; that the State is trustee of all natural resources “which are by nature meant for public use and enjoyment”; that the public at large is beneficiary of the seashore, running waters, air, forests and ecologically fragile lands; that the State as trustee is under a legal duty to protect the natural resources; and that such resources cannot be converted into private ownership.25

The second proposition supplies both the doctrine’s reach and its limit: the State is trustee of all natural resources, but only of those which are by nature meant for public use and enjoyment. The second and fourth propositions then do not say the same thing, and the difference between them carries the argument that follows. The second qualifies the trust res by reference to human use. The fourth states the trustee’s duty without that qualifier: the duty is to protect the natural resources, not to protect public use of them. Read alone, the second yields the orthodox account, in which the doctrine functions as a restraint on executive management and alienation of common resources: it denies the State the position of absolute owner, and harm to a river is a failure of trusteeship owed to human beneficiaries, whether as loss of access, diminished public use, environmental deterioration affecting people, or misuse of a common resource. Read together with the fourth, the doctrine already contains a duty directed at the resource rather than at its users. The doctrine in its orthodox form does not define the protection of the river’s ecological integrity and restoration as the direct organising purpose of the trust, and Indian public trust doctrine has been developed almost entirely on the second proposition (Ghosh 2019c; Bhullar 2019b; Barresi 2012; Blumm and Guthrie 2012). What Section 4 reconstructs is the fourth.

That reading does not rest on an inference from silence. Immediately before the passage, the Court set out the Californian Mono Lake decision at length, including its holding that the traditional triad of navigation, commerce and fishing does not limit the public interest in the trust res, and its treatment of the preservation of lands in their natural state as itself among the uses the trust protects.26 The Court then endorsed the direction of travel in terms, seeing no reason why the doctrine should not be expanded to include all ecosystems operating in India’s natural resources.27 The materials for a river-centred fiduciary purpose are therefore present in Kamal Nath itself. What the judgement does not do is convert scope into standard. It brings ecosystems within the doctrine’s reach without specifying the condition in which the trustee must maintain them, or the point at which failure to maintain them is breach.

Two features of the judgement constrain how far that conversion can be judicially driven, and a reconstruction that passed over them would not survive scrutiny. The first is allocation. The Court located the resolution of conflicts between preservation and development with the legislature, reserving to the executive under the doctrine the negative obligation not to abdicate natural resources into private ownership in the absence of legislation.28 A reconstruction that turned the doctrine into a positive programme of ecological management directed by courts would exceed that allocation. The second is remedial position. Restoration enters the judgement as remedy rather than as purpose: the Court directed the State to restore the leased area to its original natural condition and the motel to bear the cost of reversing the ecological damage, but both follow a finding of breach rather than define the obligation breached.29

This yields the correction internal to the public trust doctrine, and the reconstruction in Section 4 is shaped by both constraints. It does not propose that Kamal Nath be replaced, nor that courts assume a managerial function the judgement assigns to the legislature. It proposes that the duty stated in the fourth proposition, to protect the natural resources, be given the content the judgement left unspecified, so that the ecological integrity of the river and, where injury has occurred, its restoration, constitutes the fiduciary purpose by reference to which trusteeship is assessed. Holding that rivers fall within the doctrine’s scope establishes which natural resources the doctrine protects. It does not, without more, determine the ecological condition the trustee must preserve. The current doctrine can hold that the State has failed to protect the public in relation to a river. It does not state with the same precision that impairment of the river’s flow, morphology or ecological continuity is itself a breach of a fiduciary purpose directed to river integrity. The distance between those two propositions is short, and Kamal Nath supplies most of it. Section 4 develops the reconstruction within the architecture supplied by Kamal Nath.

3.4. Juridical Personhood: Status Without Governance

The Uttarakhand High Court in Mohd. Salim v State of Uttarakhand declared the Ganga and Yamuna to be living entities with the status of legal persons, “with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities”.30 In Lalit Miglani v State of Uttarakhand, the same court extended the approach to glaciers and related natural water bodies.31 Juridical personhood resolves the beneficiary problem at the level of legal form: when the river is a legal person, injury becomes injury to the river, guardians can represent it, and courts can directly pronounce on rights vested in it. The resolution is incomplete, however, in ways that cannot be corrected by better drafting.

Michaels’s comparative typology locates the source of that incompleteness, distinguishing nature-based approaches to rights of nature from rights-based approaches that expand the class of possible rightsholders (Michaels 2026).32 The Uttarakhand declarations belong to the rights-based type: they extend rightsholder status to the Ganga and Yamuna without the ontological reconstruction the nature-based route attempts. It is characteristic of that route that enlarging the class of rightsholders does not, of itself, supply the governance capacity the new status then demands. The Uttarakhand declarations left three linked governance questions unresolved: representation across jurisdictions, allocation of liability for diffuse or multi-actor harm, and integration with monitoring and enforcement. Their reliance on state office-holders as guardians illustrates the fragility of a state-bounded model for a transboundary river (Nakazora 2023).

Mohd. Salim is especially revealing because the Court was simultaneously compelling the constitution of the inter-State Ganga Management Board under Section 80 of the U.P. Reorganisation Act 2000, yet did not connect that governance architecture to the personhood declaration. The declaration therefore changed legal status without integrating the institution already before the Court. The representation arrangement sharpened the problem. Rather than appointing the inter-State Board, the Court appointed three office-holders in loco parentis, including the Chief Secretary and Advocate General of Uttarakhand, and directed the Advocate General to represent the rivers. The river’s representative could therefore also be counsel to a State whose conduct might be challenged. Status and governance remained disconnected.

The route to personhood also matters. Mohd. Salim reasoned from Hindu devotion and the juristic personality of idols, making Sacred status a ground of the legal conclusion. The present argument instead treats sacredness as an institutional and material fact: it can identify practices and bodies relevant to regulation but does not itself generate legal obligation. The Supreme Court’s stay confirmed what the judgement had already disclosed. The recorded reasons included possible interference with the rights of other States and uncertainty about responsibility for compensation in the event of natural disasters.33 Personhood changes status. It does not, by itself, allocate governance across jurisdictions, specify responsibilities, or design a workable remedial and supervisory regime. The personhood cases therefore establish a narrower point: legal personality can make injury to a river directly cognisable, but without representation, allocation of responsibility and enforcement architecture it remains institutionally incomplete (Alley 2019; Clark et al. 2018; Parihar and Bhullar 2025; Suresh 2025; Solimeo 2018).

The personhood route also invites an objection at the level of legal form. Tănăsescu argues that the legal person on which rights-based rights of nature depend is modelled on an idealised human individual, so that its rights remain those of an individual qua individual, a form ill-suited to the relational normativity such regimes invoke (Tănăsescu 2026). That form is not imported into Indian law from comparative sources: Mohd. Salim takes it from the idol cases, in which the juristic person stands to its guardian as a minor to a shebait, and applies the analogy to a river.34 Sacred public trust answers this in the same way by which it answers the governance objection: constituting the river as the object of a public-law fiduciary purpose, rather than as a rights-bearing person, secures the beneficiary without the individual-rights form Tănăsescu criticises, and admits sacred normativity on institutional and material terms rather than as the attribute of a legal subject (Tănăsescu 2026). Status without governance does not resolve the structural deficit in direct river-centred protection. Section 4 retains the institutional discipline of the Indian doctrine while treating the river as the legally protected object of a public fiduciary purpose, rather than as a rights-bearing legal person.

4. From Orthodox Public Trust to Sacred Public Trust: River Integrity as a Public Fiduciary Purpose

4.1. Reconstruction Within Indian Constitutional Materials

Indian environmental constitutionalism has treated trusteeship as a constraint on State power over natural resources, applied across rivers, forests, coasts, and groundwater. The doctrine’s reach has expanded considerably since M.C. Mehta v Kamal Nath, but its beneficiary structure has remained unchanged. The reconstruction proposed here proceeds within the constitutional materials that Kamal Nath and its progeny supply. Kamal Nath supplies more of the reconstruction than is usually noticed, and Section 3.3 has shown what it supplies. At paragraph 33 the Court (in Kamal Nath) saw no reason why the doctrine should not be expanded to include all ecosystems operating in India’s natural resources, and at paragraph 34 it stated the trustee’s duty as a duty to protect the natural resources, without the qualification by public use carried by the second proposition of that paragraph. What the judgement does not supply is the standard: it brings ecosystems within the doctrine’s scope without specifying the ecological condition in which the trustee must maintain them, or the point at which failure to maintain them is a breach. This section supplies that standard. The Supreme Court held that the State is “the trustee of all natural resources which are by nature meant for public use and enjoyment” (M.C. Mehta v Kamal Nath (1997) 1 SCC 388).35

The comparative public-trust scholarship documents the expansion of reach, and that expansion confirms the diagnostic point: reach has changed, beneficiary logic has not. Blumm and Guthrie show that the doctrine has expanded beyond its core of navigable waters and public access to include ecological protection, public standing, intergenerational equity and complex remedies (Blumm and Guthrie 2012); Wood develops the most expansive reconstruction in the US literature, treating natural resources as ecological assets held in trust for present and future generations and applying that reconstruction to the climate context through atmospheric trust litigation (Wood 2014); Robinson locates environmental rights within older traditions of accountable government (Robinson 2020); and Barresi shows that public-trust reasoning in India has broadened the scope of protected purposes beyond navigation, commerce and fishing (Barresi 2012). These accounts establish that the doctrine has adapted in its reach and remedial ambition. However, even Wood’s reconstruction (Wood 2014), the most ecologically oriented in the comparative literature, retains present and future generations as beneficiaries rather than organising fiduciary obligation directly around the ecological integrity and restoration of the natural resource itself.

4.2. The Two Prongs of Huffman’s Critique

The most serious objection to any reconstructive use of the public trust doctrine is Huffman’s, and meeting it on its own terms is a precondition for the reconstruction proposed in this article. His critique has two prongs. The first is that the doctrine has a mythological or overstated history, particularly regarding its Roman pedigree (Huffman 2007). The second is that expanding the doctrine beyond its narrow common-law boundaries risks lawless judicial discretion: new public rights entail new duties, and courts cannot create them without raising rule-of-law and separation-of-powers concerns (Huffman 2015).

The first prong does not reach the present argument because the present argument does not draw its authority from a common-law pedigree. The sacred public trust depends on the constitutionally entrenched Indian version of the doctrine, as developed in Kamal Nath and read alongside Articles 21, 48A and 51A(g) of the Constitution. Whether the Roman or English roots of the orthodox doctrine are mythological is, for present purposes, doctrinally irrelevant. The second prong requires the proposed doctrine to bind itself by limiting conditions that constrain judicial discretion. Three conditions discipline the reconstruction and meet that prong: institutional materiality, ecological translatability, and constitutional plurality. They create no open-ended public rights; they structure the interpretation of existing constitutional duties, statutory powers and remedial provisions around a public fiduciary purpose directed to the river’s ecological integrity and restoration. “The Disciplining Conditions: Materiality, Translatability, Plurality” Section develops each in turn. Courts and tribunals articulate and apply the relevant duties, review permissions, require plans, supervise restoration and correct administrative failures. The judicial role does not extend to assuming the primary task of river management; the State remains the primary trustee. The difficulty exposed by the personhood cases was that legal status was declared without an adequate governance structure. Sacred public trust begins with the governance structure and defines the protected fiduciary purpose within it.

The Disciplining Conditions: Materiality, Translatability, Plurality

Whether the reconstruction can be distinguished from judicial invention turns on these three conditions. Without them, it would be exactly what Huffman warns against: a vehicle for judges to import policy preferences into common-law doctrine under the cover of trust language (Huffman 2007, 2015). They are not a list of considerations but the operative tests through which the doctrine binds itself, determining which institutions attract fiduciary duties, which normative commitments enter public law, and how the doctrine operates across the constitutional architecture of secularism, federalism, and religious freedom.

The first condition, institutional materiality, connects practice-specific duties to legally relevant control over river-affecting activity. Such duties do not arise solely from religious identity or material influence. They arise where an institution’s legally structured authority or responsibility places river-affecting practices within its control under the reconstructed public-trust framework. Institutional materiality identifies the necessary nexus between the institution’s authority, the relevant activity and the ecological risk. It also calibrates the scope of the duty: an institution bears responsibility only for practices over which it exercises legally relevant and material control. Material control includes the capacity, through institutional action, to determine what happens to land, water, waste, sanitation, festival management or riverbank use. Applied to Thrissur, the condition explains why the Cochin Devaswom Board incurs duties in respect of Vadakkunnathan and Thrissur Pooram that the Malabar Devaswom Board does not. The Cochin Devaswom Board controls the festival, temple land, procession routes, and post-festival cleaning; the Malabar Devaswom Board controls none of these in the Vadakkunnathan setting. The duties follow the control. Religious character is not the trigger and not the bar; what triggers the doctrine is the institution’s material role in the practices that produce the cumulative river injury.

The second condition, ecological translatability, restricts the normative commitments the doctrine can register to those that a secular court or regulator can state and enforce. Sacred and other normative commitments enter public law only where they can be translated into legally cognisable obligations: restraint, prevention, clean-up, restoration, disclosure, monitoring, reporting. The translation must not require courts to adjudicate theology. A claim that a particular ritual practice is religiously meaningful is not, by itself, a legal claim. A claim that an institution exercising material control over that practice has failed to prevent, mitigate, or remediate its ecological consequences is one. Translatability is what distinguishes sacred public trust from a doctrine of religiously grounded environmental ethics. The court does not enquire whether a practice is sacred; it enquires whether an institution exercising material control over the practice has discharged the secular fiduciary obligations attached to the doctrine.

The third condition, constitutional plurality, ensures that the doctrine attaches to any institution exercising comparable material control regardless of confessional identity, and operates within the constitutional limits of secularism, federalism, and religious freedom under Articles 25 and 26. The doctrine is not Hindu-temple-specific, even though the Thrissur material on which it is tested involves Hindu institutional structures. A Christian church administration, a Muslim waqf, a Sikh gurdwara committee, or a non-confessional festival committee that exercises comparable material control over river-affecting practice attracts comparable fiduciary duties. Plurality is what distinguishes sacred public trust from a confessional doctrine and what brings it within the constitutional commitments to equality (Articles 14 and 15), religious freedom (Articles 25 and 26), and secular State action that constrain any public-law regime in India.

The three conditions operate cumulatively, not in an alternative manner. An institution attracts fiduciary duties under sacred public trust only where all three conditions are satisfied: it must exercise material control (materiality), its normative commitments must be translatable into legally cognisable obligations (translatability), and the doctrine must apply to it on terms that would apply to comparable institutions of any confessional character (plurality). The cumulative structure is the doctrine’s main disciplining device and its answer to Huffman’s second prong. The claim is not that the three conditions mechanically determine outcomes or eliminate judicial development. Their function is to structure the interpretation and application of duties derived from Kamal Nath, Articles 21, 48A, and 51A(g), and relevant statutory and public law powers. Their terms are stated in advance, their application depends on findings of fact, and their use remains open to judicial review. The conditions therefore aim to convert potentially open-ended discretion into structured, reviewable legal judgement.

4.3. The River as the Object of a Public-Law Fiduciary Purpose

The river is not a beneficiary in the private-law equitable sense, and stating this at the outset is the discipline the reconstruction requires. The river holds no proprietary entitlement; it exercises no Saunders v Vautier rights (Saunders v Vautier (1841) 4 Beav 115; 49 ER 282);36 it cannot consent to or vary the terms of the trust. To say that the river is a beneficiary in that sense would either fail conceptually or collapse into the personhood model the article rejects.

The reconstruction is purpose-based. Its public fiduciary purpose is the protection of the river’s ecological integrity and, where injury has occurred, its restoration. The river is the ecological entity to which that purpose is directed and, in that sense, the legally protected object of the fiduciary structure. The structural analogy is to the charitable trust under English law, in which the legally recognised object is a purpose rather than a privately enforceable beneficial interest, and enforcement is channelled through public institutions and judicial supervision rather than through a beneficiary’s proprietary claim. The analogy is limited and structural: it does not assimilate Indian public trust doctrine to English charity law, nor does it make the river a charitable or equitable beneficiary.37 The related literature on environmental and non-charitable purpose trusts provides a further possible structural analogy insofar as it concerns purpose-based protection of ecological conditions or defined ecological entities (Kurki 2022; see also Vatter 2020). The river need not possess equitable rights or legal personality for the public fiduciary purpose to be enforced through Indian public-law procedure.

The doctrine, set out plainly, runs as follows. The public fiduciary purpose is the protection of the river’s ecological integrity and, where injury has occurred, its restoration; the river is the legally protected object of that purpose. The State is the primary trustee, charged with duties of prevention, coordination and repair. Temple-linked institutions may bear practice-specific public-law duties where their legally structured authority or responsibility places river-affecting practices within their material control. The scope of each duty is calibrated to the scope of that control through institutional materiality and is further constrained by ecological translatability and constitutional plurality. Standing, breach, forum and remedies remain within the public-law procedures set out in Section 7. Personhood is unnecessary because protection depends on a purpose-based fiduciary structure rather than rights-bearing legal status.

The reconstruction occupies an intermediate position between the public trust doctrine and rights-of-nature personhood, two distinct approaches examined in the comparative literature (Ryan et al. 2021). It does not treat the river merely as the means through which human use and benefit are secured, but neither does it make the river a rights-bearing legal person. The river is instead the legally protected object of a public fiduciary purpose directed to its ecological integrity and restoration, while legally accountable persons and institutions remain the bearers of duties. O’Loughlin’s due-process analysis is relevant to the distinct proposition that public-trust interests and the exercise of State trustee authority may be subjected to constitutional constraints; it does not provide the conceptual basis for treating the river as a protected object without legal personality (O’Loughlin 2017).

4.4. Article 21 and the Constitutional Architecture of Reconstruction

Article 21 and the sacred public trust occupy distinct but parallel positions in the constitutional architecture, and the reconstruction depends on a correct understanding of their relationship. Article 21 secures the human dimension through the citizen as rights-bearer: the Subhash Kumar line establishes that the right to life includes the right to a pollution-free environment (Subhash Kumar v State of Bihar (1991) 1 SCC 598),38 the Ganga pollution litigation in M.C. Mehta v Union of India deploys continuing mandamus to compel pollution control; the T.N. Godavarman39 line, operating under the Forest Conservation Act 1980 rather than Article 21, corrects the statutory scope of the protected object and builds the supervisory machinery to give that correction effect; and Indian Council for Enviro-Legal Action40 develops polluter-pays and absolute-liability principles in the industrial context. Articles 48A and 51A(g) supply the directive and citizen-duty dimensions.

The sacred public trust secures the ecological dimension through the river itself, as the object of fiduciary obligations, and the two doctrines are parallel rather than competing. Article 21 makes pollution constitutionally cognisable as a violation of the human right to a healthy environment. The sacred public trust makes pollution constitutionally cognisable as a breach of the fiduciary duty owed in respect of the river’s integrity. The Article 21 claim is brought by or for an affected human; the sacred public trust claim is brought through public-law procedure in respect of the river as the object of a fiduciary purpose. The two routes can be pursued together, and the parallelism is itself a doctrinal strength: where human-centred litigation reaches its bearer-medium limit, the trust route remains available to address what the river itself loses. Rajamani’s analysis of the Article 21 environmental right concludes that “environmental right jurisprudence in India, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s enthusiastic adoption of international environmental law principles, is yet to come of age” (Rajamani 2007b, p. 285); the parallelism proposed here is one doctrinal response to that condition, not a substitute for Article 21 enforcement but a second constitutional route oriented to the river itself rather than to the citizen.

The reconstruction is not a doctrinal innovation in the strong sense, and that is its strength rather than its weakness. Kamal Nath already treats the State as a fiduciary in respect of natural resources. The Ganga pollution litigation already recognises the Court’s supervisory jurisdiction over cumulative ecological injury. T.N. Godavarman already reasons from a statute’s ecological purpose to the scope of the object it protects, holding that the legal forest must follow the ecological forest rather than the classified one. The reconstruction reads these threads together: the fiduciary form of Kamal Nath, the supervisory form of the Ganga litigation, and the scope-correcting form of T.N. Godavarman, organised around the river as the object of fiduciary purpose. The doctrine works through existing constitutional materials. It organises them to perform work that they currently perform in fragments.

5. Public Trust in Comparative Perspective: Te Awa Tupua, the Atrato and the Yarra

Three rights-of-nature regimes have developed the institutional architecture against which any new river-protection doctrine must now be tested. Te Awa Tupua, established under the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (NZ), is the most fully institutionalised. The Atrato, recognised as a subject of rights by the Colombian Constitutional Court in T-622/16, is the closest constitutional parallel to the present argument. The Yarra River, protected under the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017 (Vic), is the closest legislative analogue to sacred public trust in respect of purpose-based river protection without legal personhood. Together, they map the routes by which legal systems have moved beyond treating rivers as objects of regulatory management: legislative settlement, constitutional adjudication, and statutory fiduciary regulation. Sacred public trust takes a fourth route: doctrinal reconstruction within existing constitutional-fiduciary materials. The contribution of this fourth route depends on what it accomplishes that the three established routes do not, and on the limits, it shares with them.

Other rights-of-nature regimes confirm the wider trajectory, but Te Awa Tupua, the Atrato and the Yarra are selected because each tests a distinct institutional route relevant here: legislative settlement, constitutional adjudication and statutory purpose-based river protection. Te Awa Tupua pairs legal entity status with governance in the same statute. The 2017 Act establishes Te Pou Tupua to act and speak for the river, gives legal relevance to Tupua te Kawa, requires a multi-actor strategy, and provides dedicated funding. Its significance here is institutional: representation, normativity, strategy and resources accompany status rather than being left for later construction. The regime also reflects the Treaty settlement and Whanganui iwi relationship with the river, rather than a free-standing transplantation of ‘rights of nature’ (Te Aho 2016; Iorns 2026). Its institutional strength nevertheless has limits, including the distinction between ownership of the riverbed and water. For present purposes, the central lesson is that river status gains practical force through representation, capacity, funding and integration with existing governance (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones 2018).

Te Awa Tupua thus supplies three lessons: representation must accompany status; non-State normativity must be translated into legally administrable standards; and implementation requires strategy and resources. Sacred public trust seeks those functions through existing Indian public-law institutions rather than through a new legal person.

The comparison is therefore limited. Te Awa Tupua is a legislative Treaty settlement with a legal person, dedicated guardians and funding. Sacred public trust is a doctrinal reconstruction that leaves legal duties with existing State and non-State actors. Its advantage is doctrinal availability; its corresponding weakness is the absence of dedicated institutional machinery. That difference defines the comparison: sacred public trust can operate without new legislation but cannot reproduce the institutional completeness that legislation supplied in Aotearoa New Zealand.

5.1. The Atrato: A Closer Constitutional Parallel

The Atrato decision is the closer comparator because it confirms that constitutional adjudication can supply substantial elements of a rights-of-nature regime without legislation, where the constitutional framework permits. In Sentencia T-622/16, decided in tutela proceedings, the Colombian Constitutional Court declared that “the Atrato River is subject to rights that imply its protection, conservation, maintenance and, in the specific case, restoration”.41 The operative order then recognised “the Atrato River, its basin and tributaries as an entity subject to rights of protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration by the State and ethnic communities”.42 The Court required the national government and the claimant ethnic communities to act as the river’s legal representatives and guardians, and to establish a commission of guardians for its protection, recovery and conservation.43 It separately ordered public authorities, together with the claimant communities and supporting institutions, to design and implement a plan to decontaminate the Atrato River Basin and its tributaries, recover their ecosystems and prevent further environmental damage,44 as well as a joint action plan to neutralise and definitively eradicate illegal mining activities in the Atrato River, its tributaries and the Department of Chocó.45

The Atrato decision shows that the rights-of-nature move can be carried out through constitutional adjudication of an institutional rather than a declaratory kind. First, the Court did not rely on a free-standing personhood declaration: the recognition of the Atrato as a subject of rights was grounded in the Colombian constitutional framework of fundamental rights, environmental protection, and ethnic-cultural rights, and was achieved through tutela, the constitutional remedy for the protection of fundamental rights. The doctrinal move is constitutional adjudication, not declaration. Second, the integration of community normativity was institutional: the guardianship arrangement designated Afro-Colombian and Indigenous community representatives alongside State actors, based on the communities’ material relationship to the river rather than on identity as such. Third, the decision was issued in response to cumulative ecological injury: mining, deforestation, mercury contamination, and the displacement of communities produced by multiple actors operating over decades; the remedial structure was designed for cumulative harm, not for discrete violation.

It is this capacity to construct a river-protection regime from constitutional rights, community claims, and institutional duties, without waiting for legislative settlement, that makes the Atrato the closest parallel to the sacred public trust argument advanced here. Macpherson analyses the Atrato judgement as a Colombian example of river legal subjectivity, arising from proceedings brought on behalf of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in response to serious environmental and humanitarian damage caused by illegal mining, and shows that the recognition of the river as a legal subject gave those communities a representative role in river governance through guardianship (Macpherson 2019, pp. 131–60). Macpherson, Torres Ventura and Clavijo Ospina situate the Colombian river cases within an emerging constitutionalism of nature but warn that river rights must be understood alongside the rights, interests and tenures of Indigenous peoples and local communities rather than as a free-standing ecological abstraction (Macpherson et al. 2020, pp. 521–40). The pluralist point is more directly supported by Macpherson and Clavijo Ospina, who argue that the Whanganui and Atrato models use river personhood to accommodate diverse legal and cultural interests and to establish a collaborative relationship between the State and river communities; on their account, the practical value of personhood depends less on the fiction of legal personality than on the institutional framework that makes it enforceable (Macpherson and Clavijo Ospina 2018, pp. 283–93). Clark, Emmanouil, Page, and Pelizzon place Atrato, Whanganui, and the Ganges and Yamuna within the broader comparative field of river personhood and river governance and are useful for distinguishing institutionally detailed models from more precarious court-declared forms of river legal personality (Clark et al. 2018, pp. 787–844).

Here, the correspondence runs deeper because both regimes operate within the constitutional order rather than alongside it. Both integrate non-State normativity through institutional materiality: Afro-Colombian and Indigenous community relationships in the Atrato; and temple-mediated normativity in sacred public trust rather than through confessional or ethnic identity as such. Both treat the river as protected through fiduciary or quasi-fiduciary duties rather than through full personhood, as the Mohd. Salim line attempted. Both address cumulative injury produced by dispersed practices across heterogeneous actors.

Two further differences distinguish the Indian setting from the Colombian one. First, tutela, the procedural vehicle through which the Atrato judgement was delivered, has no direct counterpart in Indian constitutional procedure; the functional equivalents are writs under Articles 32 and 226 and proceedings before the National Green Tribunal. Second, Colombia’s unitary State enabled the Constitutional Court to allocate guardianship between Colombian State actors and community representatives in a single judgement, without addressing Union–State allocation. India’s federal architecture makes that move unavailable. Sacred public trust must allocate trusteeship across the Union, the State, and the local-government level (a matter Section 6.3 develops), and the allocation cannot be made through a single judicial decision of the kind T-622/16 represents.

The Atrato decision illustrates a constitutional-adjudication route to river protection. It demonstrates that, where the constitutional framework permits, a court can recognise a river as a subject of rights, establish a joint State–community guardianship arrangement, and order a detailed remedial programme without prior river-specific legislation. Sacred public trust would also operate through constitutional adjudication. However, its doctrinal form is different: rather than conferring legal personhood or beneficiary status on the river, it reconstructs existing Indian public-trust doctrine around a public fiduciary purpose directed to river integrity and restoration. It adds three limiting conditions and an allocation of responsibilities adapted to India’s federal constitutional order. Although T-622/16 allocated responsibilities among national, departmental, municipal, environmental and community actors, Colombia’s unitary constitutional structure meant that it did not confront the Union–State division of competence that the Indian reconstruction must address.

5.2. The Yarra: Statutory Fiduciary Duty Without Personhood

The Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017 (Vic) is the closest legislative analogue to sacred public trust because it protects the river through statutory purpose, public duties, strategic planning and institutional representation, without making legal personhood do the doctrinal work. The Act declares the Yarra River and certain adjacent public land for protection as “one living and integrated natural entity”.46 It establishes the Birrarung Council as an independent statutory voice for the river.47 The operative structure is therefore one of institutionalised stewardship: responsible public entities must have regard to the Yarra protection principles, the Yarra Strategic Plan is prepared through a collaborative process, and the Plan must identify which parts bind responsible public entities and which operate only as recommendations.48 O’Bryan’s (2019) analysis supports this distinction, treating the Birrarung Council as an independent voice for the river while distinguishing the Victorian model from the legal-personhood framework adopted for the Whanganui River.

The Yarra Act demonstrates that the rights-of-nature field is not coextensive with personhood, and this comparative warrant serves as the basis for sacred public trust. The Yarra secures protection through public-body duties under a statute; the sacred public trust secures protection through public-body duties under a reconstructed constitutional-fiduciary doctrine. The difference is the legal source: statute in Victoria, doctrinal reconstruction in India. The similarity lies in the protection mechanism: fiduciary-type duties on public bodies, with an institutional apparatus to direct and review their discharge. The Yarra shows that the sacred public trust’s avoidance of legal personality is a known structural option in the field, not a doctrinal compromise forced by Indian constitutional difficulties.

5.3. Sacred Public Trust as Doctrinal Reconstruction

The comparative analysis yields three claims about the contribution of sacred public trust to global rights-of-nature scholarship, each positioned against what the three principal comparators do not provide in the same form. The first claim is methodological. Sacred public trust offers a distinctive institutional route: reconstruction through existing constitutional-fiduciary doctrine without depending on new legislation or legal personality. Te Awa Tupua and the Yarra depend on statutory frameworks; the Atrato proceeds through constitutional adjudication of an expansive tutela kind; and the Indian personhood cases used constitutional adjudication of a declaratory kind but did not supply an adequate implementation architecture. Sacred public trust pursues a fourth path: the doctrinal reconstruction of an existing fiduciary doctrine using materials that the Supreme Court has already deployed. The article argues that this path may be available in legal systems with a developed public trust doctrine and a constitutional framework for environmental protection. Among South and Southeast Asian jurisdictions, Bangladesh (Islam and O’Donnell 2020), Pakistan (Munir 2017) and the Philippines (Blumm and Guthrie 2012) have incorporated public-trust reasoning into environmental protection, while several common-law jurisdictions retain comparable doctrines. None of the principal comparators examined here develops the same purpose-based reconstruction of public trust around river integrity and restoration.

The second claim is constitutional and concerns a distinction not addressed by the principal comparators examined here. Te Awa Tupua integrates Māori normativity; the Atrato integrates Afro-Colombian and Indigenous community normativity; and the Yarra integrates Wurundjeri normativity to a lesser extent. Indigenous and religious normativity raise different constitutional questions: the secularism-and-plurality questions developed in Section 6 are not the questions that Te Awa Tupua or T-622/16 had to answer. Sacred public trust provides an account of how religious normativity can enter secular public law on institutional and material terms, without privileging any one tradition or collapsing the secular structure. This contribution is distinct from those made by the principal comparators examined here, which address Indigenous and community normativity but do not confront the same questions of secularism, religious freedom and constitutional plurality developed in Section 6.

The third claim concerns institutional limits, and openly stating them is necessary to the doctrine’s maturity. Sacred public trust does not supply the funding architecture of Te Awa Tupua, where statutory provision accompanies the settlement. It does not establish a permanent guardianship body equivalent to Te Pou Tupua, nor does it provide the remedial commission ordered by T-622/16 for the Atrato. It depends on judicial and administrative implementation rather than an embedded statutory structure. The risk is symbolic recognition without ecological effect—a risk illustrated by the limited institutional implementation of the Mohd. Salim declaration. These limitations argue, in due course, for legislative supplementation through river-basin authorities, statutory representation and dedicated funding arrangements, but they do not undermine the doctrinal reconstruction itself. The reconstruction develops the fiduciary reasoning in M.C. Mehta v Kamal Nath by organising existing constitutional and public law materials around the protection of river integrity and its restoration. It may also provide a doctrinal basis for later legislative supplementation, although such legislation does not legally depend on the prior judicial adoption of sacred public trust. Legislation could provide the funding, representation and administrative architecture that doctrinal reconstruction alone cannot.

Those institutional limitations, however, do not describe a gap between an incomplete Indian doctrine and a complete comparator. Te Awa Tupua, the most institutionally complete of the models, itself falls short of the indivisible whole it declares because, as Iorns observes, the river’s water remains outside the legal entity’s ownership (Iorns 2026, p. 302). Each route makes its own compromise; the choice between them turns on which compromise a given legal system can bear, not on a ranking of the complete against the incomplete. The comparative case for sacred public trust is therefore not that it is institutionally superior to Te Awa Tupua or the Atrato. It is a different kind of contribution: a route of doctrinal reconstruction that does not depend on either a negotiated legislative settlement or tutela-type adjudication. Its contribution lies in adding a distinct route of doctrinal reconstruction to the comparative range of river-protection models.

6. Constitutional Limits: Religious Freedom, Federalism, and Plurality

6.1. Articles 25 and 26: Reach and Limit

Articles 25 and 26 are structured as reach-and-limit provisions, and the limit they supply is what makes sacred public trust constitutionally available. Article 25(1) protects freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to public order, morality, health and the other provisions of Part III. Article 25(2)(a) reserves to the State the power to regulate or restrict “economic, financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated with religious practice”. Article 26 protects the right of every religious denomination to manage its own affairs in matters of religion, to own and acquire property, and to administer such property, the last of these in accordance with law under Article 26(d) (Constitution of India 1950, arts 25, 26).

The constitutional architecture of Article 25 places the secular consequences of religiously associated activity within State regulatory power, and Article 26 follows the same structure. The reach of Article 25 is the protection of belief, profession, practice and propagation under 25(1). The limit is twofold: the internal limit of public order, morality, health and the other Part III provisions; and the secular-activity carve-out in 25(2)(a). Article 26’s protection of the management of religious affairs is subject to the requirement that the administration of property proceed in accordance with the law.

Shirur Mutt established the secular-activity distinction that Article 25(2)(a) presupposes, and it is that distinction on which sacred public trust depends. The Court held that what 25(2)(a) “contemplates is not regulation by the State of religious practices as such, the freedom of which is guaranteed by the Constitution except when they run counter to public order, health and morality, but regulation of activities which are economic, commercial or political in their character though they are associated with religious practices” (Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt AIR 1954 SC 282).49 The constitutional position is the operation of 25(2)(a) as the Court has read it since: secular activities associated with religious practice are regulable; religious practices as such are not.

The duties imposed by sacred public trust on Devaswom Boards and temple authorities sit on the secular side of the Shirur Mutt line, and stating this at the outset disposes of the broadest objection to the doctrine. The duties attach to the secular and material effects of institutional conduct: waste management, sanitation, riverbank occupation, the use of temporary structures, the discharge of offerings, post-festival clean-up and cooperation in restoration. They regulate neither belief as such nor ritual meaning. The constitutional position is narrower than a general claim that environmental law overrides religion. Public law regulates the secular and environmentally injurious consequences of religiously associated activity; it does not prescribe doctrine.

6.2. The Essential Religious Practices Doctrine and the Sabarimala Reopening

The strongest constitutional objection to sacred public trust fails because the doctrine does not turn on the determination of essentiality, and it operates symmetrically across both possible outcomes of the Sabarimala reference. The objection would run that the duties proposed here regulate religious practices; that whether those practices are essential religious practices and therefore protected under Article 25(1) is constitutionally unsettled after Sabarimala; that sacred public trust therefore depends on the resolution of contested constitutional questions and is doctrinally unstable. The objection fails for the reason developed in this subsection: the duties attach to the secular side of the Article 25(2)(a) line, and that line operates regardless of how the essentiality question is resolved.

The essential religious practices doctrine, developed from Shirur Mutt,50 distinguishes between religious practice protected under 25(1) and the secular activities associated with religion that the State may regulate under 25(2)(a). The doctrine has operated across seven decades; the Court has accepted some claims of essentiality and rejected others. The doctrine has been substantially criticised in the scholarly literature (Sen 2010; Das Acevedo 2016, 2024; Dhavan and Nariman 2000; Kaul 2022). The criticisms do not displace the secular/religious distinction that 25(2)(a) presupposes: 25(2)(a) supplies the State’s power to regulate secular activities associated with religious practice, whether or not the underlying activity is itself an essential religious practice.

The duties imposed by sacred public trust attach to the secular side of that distinction and to activities that municipal, pollution-control, and public-order regulation have long addressed in religious settings without raising Article 25 questions. The activities listed in 6.1, together with crowd management, processional infrastructure and the material dimensions of immersion practices, are secular activities under 25(2)(a). The doctrine does not require courts to determine the theological content of worship. It does not require courts to redraw the religious/secular line. It applies the existing line.

Sabarimala reopened questions about the test for essentiality and about the relationship between Articles 25 and 26 and other Part III protections. Neither question bears on the present argument. A nine-judge reference is pending in Indian Young Lawyers Association v State of Kerala (2019) 11 SCC 1;51 the scholarly literature on Sabarimala and its constitutional implications is extensive (Das Acevedo 2024; Bhatia 2019). The doctrine operates symmetrically across both possible outcomes. If a practice is determined to be an essential religious practice protected under 25(1), its theological core is not regulated by the doctrine; its material and ecological consequences are regulated under 25(2)(a). If a practice is determined not to be essential, the same conclusion follows under 25(2)(a) without engaging 25(1). The constitutional architecture yields the same result by both routes.

The correction to the treatment of sacred status, developed in Section 2.4, rests on the architecture of Article 25(2)(a) rather than on any resolution of the essentiality question. Sacred status by itself neither creates a legal obligation nor precludes regulation. The doctrine attaches to institutional and material fact on the secular side of the line that Article 25(2)(a) has sustained since Shirur Mutt.

6.3. Trusteeship Across the Federal Architecture

The State’s position as primary trustee cannot run on a single undifferentiated “State”, and the federal architecture distributes responsibility across three levels in ways that determine where the doctrine attaches. Primary trusteeship in respect of rivers wholly within a State sits with the State Government. Entry 17 of the State List, Seventh Schedule, places “water, that is to say, water supplies, irrigation and canals, drainage and embankments, water storage and water power” within State legislative competence, subject to Entry 56 of the Union List (Constitution of India 1950, Seventh Schedule, List II, Entry 17; List I, Entry 56).52 For the rivers of Thrissur, primary trusteeship sits with the Government of Kerala.

The Union’s competence runs to inter-State rivers, national environmental standards and central environmental legislation, and the doctrine’s Union-level trusteeship attaches to those competences rather than to a residual federal claim. Entry 56 of the Union List supplies Union competence over the regulation and development of inter-State rivers and river valleys to the extent declared by Parliament to be expedient in the public interest. The Inter-State River Water Disputes Act 1956 implements that competence. The Environment (Protection) Act 1986 and the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1974 implement Union competence over environmental standard-setting. Article 253 empowers the legislature to give effect to international environmental obligations and has been invoked in Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum v Union of India (1996) 5 SCC 647.53

Local self-government institutions carry delegated trust obligations through the constitutional devolution effected by Parts IX and IXA, and the doctrine’s local-level trusteeship attaches specifically to those devolved functions. The Eleventh Schedule (Article 243G) and the Twelfth Schedule (Article 243W) devolve specific functions to panchayats and municipalities, respectively, including water management, sanitation, urban planning and land-use regulation (Constitution of India 1950, Schedules XI and XII; Pandey 2025). The Kerala Panchayati Raj Act 1994 and the Kerala Municipality Act 1994 implement the devolution. Riverbank protection, waste management, sanitation, festival management, and the regulation of riverbank construction fall within the local government’s competence under one or more of these heads. The duties imposed by sacred public trust on local bodies attach to those devolved functions.

Temple boards and other religiously affiliated institutions are not primary sovereign trustees, and the distinction matters because it determines which duties they bear and on what footing. They are subsidiary fiduciary duty-bearers. Their duties arise from material control over specific river-affecting practices and are conditioned by the State’s primary trusteeship and the limits set out in 6.1 and 6.2. The doctrine does not delegate sovereign trusteeship to religious institutions. It imposes practice-specific fiduciary duties on institutions whose material control over particular activities makes them appropriate duty-bearers for those activities.

The federal articulation distinguishes sacred public trust from the Mohd. Salim declaration on the precise question that defeated the personhood approach: the federal architecture is the structure within which the doctrine operates, not an obstacle to it. Personhood declared a status that the federal architecture could not absorb. The Ganga and Yamuna traverse multiple States; the declaration could not specify which authority bore which responsibility; the Supreme Court’s stay brought those federal and responsibility concerns into view. Sacred public trust works in the opposite sequence. The federal allocation of responsibility across the Union, the States, and local government structures the doctrine’s application. The doctrine reorganises that allocation around a public fiduciary purpose directed to the river’s ecological integrity and restoration, with the river as the legally protected object of that purpose.

6.4. Plurality: Institutional Materiality, Not Confessional Identity

The sacred public trust cannot attach fiduciary duties to institutions based on their religious identity. The constitutional reasons are direct. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law; Article 15(1) prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth; the Preamble declares India a secular republic; the basic structure doctrine holds that secularism is part of the Constitution and that Parliament cannot amend it.54 A doctrine that singled out Hindu religious institutions as the river’s trustees would conflict with each of these constitutional commitments. The plurality limit is constitutionally required.

The plurality limit imposes duties on institutional materiality rather than confessional identity, and three categories illustrate its application across religious, customary, and secular institutions. Religious institutions across confessional traditions are subject to the same duties: a Sufi shrine, dargah or other Islamic religious institution on the banks of a river attracts duties through the relevant waqf board or administering body, where it exercises material control over festival waste, sanitation, processional infrastructure or bank use (Waqf Act 1995; State Waqf Boards); a gurdwara administering the banks of a sarovar or river-adjacent space attracts duties on the same criterion; a church-administered institution on a riverbank attracts duties on the same criterion.

Customary and tribal institutions are subject to the same duties and criteria, with the institutional vehicle adapted to the relevant legal framework. A customary tribal authority in the Northeast or elsewhere, exercising material influence over river practices within the framework of Sixth Schedule autonomy or comparable arrangements, attracts duties within the relevant legal framework (Pandey 2025, pp. 706–7). Secular institutions exercising material control are subject to the same duties. Private operators, industrial estates, festival committees, market associations and other non-religious institutions may bear practice-specific duties where their legally structured authority or responsibility places river-affecting practices within their material control. The doctrine is therefore not a religious-actor doctrine: it applies through a neutral institutional criterion, and neither confessional identity nor theological commitment, by itself, gives rise to trust duties. Institutional materiality requires an identifiable nexus between the actor’s legally relevant authority or responsibility, the river-affecting practice within its control, and the threatened injury to river integrity. The scope of any duty remains calibrated to that authority, responsibility and control. This discipline makes the proposed doctrine constitutionally defensible in a pluralist setting and ensures that its application remains consistent with constitutional equality and secularism.

6.5. Institutional Competence and the Limits of Judicial Reconstruction

The institutional-competence objection takes two forms, and both fail for reasons internal to the line of environmental constitutionalism that the reconstruction inherits. The first form is the separation-of-powers form: the reconstruction asks courts to do work reserved to Parliament and the State legislatures. The response is that the reconstruction asks courts to do what they have done in environmental constitutionalism since the 1980s. Kamal Nath developed the public trust doctrine through judicial reasoning, without legislative authorisation. The Ganga pollution litigation developed into a continuing mandamus under judicial supervision, without a statutory mandate. T.N. Godavarman developed supervisory jurisdiction over forest matters through judicial innovation. Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum incorporated the precautionary and polluter-pays principles into Indian environmental law through judicial reading of Articles 21, 48A and 51A(g). The reconstruction proposed here belongs to that tradition (and, as Section 4.4 has set out, draws on the same line of cases). It does not exceed it.

The second form of the objection is the institutional-capacity form, and it fails because the doctrine does not place implementation capacity on the courts. The objection is that courts and tribunals lack the technical, scientific and administrative capacity to implement the doctrine. The response is that the doctrine does not require them to do so. Primary trustee responsibilities are allocated among Union, State and local authorities according to their constitutional and statutory powers. Devaswom Boards and other institutions may bear narrower practice-specific duties where legally structured responsibility and material control are established. Courts do not bear these duties. The judicial role is articulation, review, supervision and correction. Within the jurisdiction conferred on it by the National Green Tribunal Act 2010, the Tribunal supplies specialist capacity for technical environmental adjudication. Courts and tribunals do not become free-standing river managers under the doctrine; they become forums for the articulation and enforcement of duties that lie elsewhere.

These limits define the doctrine: it regulates secular ecological consequences rather than theology; follows existing federal competences; applies by material control rather than confessional identity; and leaves implementation to responsible institutions, with courts and tribunals performing review and enforcement functions.

7. Duties, Standing, Breach, Forum and Remedies

7.1. The Protected Interests of the River

The public fiduciary purpose is directed to two substantive interests associated with the river: its ecological integrity and, where injury has occurred, its restoration. These are protected interests rather than rights held by the river, proprietary interests, or equitable beneficial interests in the private-law sense. The structured representation, addressed below, is the procedural means by which alleged breaches of the purpose may be brought before an appropriate forum.

The interest in integrity is what the doctrine exists to protect, and its content is constituted by the conditions of continued river functioning rather than by any single ecological metric. Integrity comprises water quality, flow, morphology, bank stability, flood-margin relations and wetland connectivity. The Indian public-trust literature already recognises ecological values as protected public interests (Barresi 2012; Blumm and Guthrie 2012). Sacred public trust does not invent ecological concern; it changes its juridical orientation by organising fiduciary obligation directly around the river’s ecological integrity rather than around public use and benefit alone.

The interest in restoration corrects a structural gap in any non-impairment-only doctrine, and it locates restoration as a primary fiduciary obligation rather than a residual remedy. Indian public-trust reasoning already points in a restorative direction. Comparative accounts of the doctrine list injunctions, rescission, damages, and restitution among the remedies available where trust obligations are breached (Blumm and Guthrie 2012). Section 15(1)(c) of the National Green Tribunal Act 2010 authorises restitution of the environment. Restoration in this argument means duties to rehabilitate polluted stretches, restore degraded banks, remove unlawful obstructions, and re-establish, so far as reasonably possible, the ecological conditions necessary for river function.

Structured representation is procedural and follows existing public-law procedure rather than creating a freestanding procedural personality for the river. The river does not sue in its own name. Proceedings under Article 32 must seek enforcement of a right conferred by Part III, while Article 226 permits writs for the enforcement of Part III rights and for any other purpose, subject in each case to the applicable rules of standing and maintainability.55 Proceedings before the National Green Tribunal must satisfy the jurisdictional and procedural requirements of the NGT Act 2010. The claim is that a trustee or other legally grounded duty-bearer has breached obligations forming part of the public fiduciary purpose directed to river integrity and restoration.

7.2. The Duties of the State as Primary Trustee

The State’s duties as primary trustee divide into negative and positive duties, and the distinction matters because each side performs specific constitutional work. The negative duty is non-impairment: the State must not authorise, permit or tolerate uses that are materially inconsistent with river integrity. Where an activity is lawfully justified, environmentally conditioned, and consistent with continuing protection, authorisation remains available. The duty does not prohibit human use of the river; it requires that human use be conditioned on protection.

The positive duties operationalise the trusteeship as a continuing fiduciary undertaking, and four functions specify it: coordination requires basin-level planning where river and wetland systems are interdependent; prevention requires the use of existing regulatory and statutory powers to anticipate and restrain conduct that materially impairs river integrity; enforcement requires the monitoring of compliance with conditions imposed on permitted activities and with general environmental obligations; restoration requires the remediation of injury where it has occurred, framed by the river’s interests rather than human convenience. These duties do not create a new private-law beneficiary; they reorient existing constitutional, statutory and public-trust obligations around river integrity and restoration, while leaving the State as primary trustee (Bhullar 2019a; Ivan 2011; Marwa 2023).

7.3. The Duties of Devaswom Boards and Temple-Linked Institutions

Devaswom Boards and temple-linked institutions bear narrower, practice-specific duties only where legally structured responsibility and material control connect them to river-affecting activity. Relevant control may concern festival management, sanitation, waste, temporary structures, riverbank occupation or post-event cleaning; religious character alone is neither sufficient nor necessary.

Table 1 sets out the duty-bearers, the basis on which duties attach to each, and the duties owed. The duties remain institutionally differentiated across boards, and this differentiation is the discipline that prevents overextension and under inclusion. The duties borne by the Cochin Devaswom Board in relation to Vadakkunnathan and Thrissur Pooram are not necessarily the duties borne by the Malabar Devaswom Board in another sub-basin. Each board’s obligations depend on the practices it materially controls, the ecological consequences of those practices, and its capacity to discharge the duties set out in Table 1. The doctrine does not convert sacred institutions into general environmental regulators, but neither does it permit them to evade responsibility where their material control conditions river injury.

Table 1. Duty-bearers, the basis on which duties attach, and the duties owed.

Duty-Bearer	Basis on Which the Duty Attaches	Duties
The State as primary trustee	Articles 21, 48A and 51A(g), the relevant pollution-control legislation, and the public trust doctrine developed in M.C. Mehta v Kamal Nath, organised in Section 4 around a public fiduciary purpose directed to river integrity and restoration.	Negative—non-impairment: must not authorise, permit or tolerate uses materially inconsistent with river integrity; human use must be conditioned on protection rather than prohibited. Positive—the trusteeship as a continuing fiduciary undertaking: coordination (basin-level planning where river and wetland systems are interdependent); prevention (use of existing regulatory and statutory powers to anticipate and restrain conduct that materially impairs integrity); enforcement (monitoring of compliance with imposed conditions and with general environmental obligations); restoration (remediation of injury, framed by the river’s interests rather than human convenience).
Devaswom Boards and temple-linked institutions	Material control over a river-affecting practice, connected to legally structured authority, responsibility or participation. Duties remain differentiated board by board (Section 2.2)	Prevention—assessed by fiduciary reasonableness against the public fiduciary purpose: organise the controlled practice to avoid preventable injury. It is not enough that a practice is customary, administratively convenient or religiously significant if avoidable ecological injury can reasonably be prevented. Redesign—constrains the form of religious practice, not its existence: where an existing practice produces avoidable injury and a reasonable alternative is available, adopt it. May require redesigning offering protocols, waste arrangements at festival sites, riverbank occupation, temporary structures, sanitation systems or post-festival clean-up procedures. Clean-up—calibrated to contribution and capacity rather than to sole causation: undertake, fund or cooperate in remedial measures proportionate to contribution, capacity and legally available powers. The participation of other actors does not necessarily eliminate responsibility where a legally grounded duty and material control are established. Disclosure—makes the State trustee’s duties of prevention and restoration meaningfully dischargeable: information material to river condition must go to the State trustee; local self-government bodies; and, where properly required, courts and tribunals, including waste quantities generated, discharge points, festival-related occupation, sanitation arrangements and ecological assessments. Cooperation in restoration—converts restoration from a state function into a shared fiduciary process: participate in the design and implementation of restoration measures to the extent justified by contribution and capacity. Coordination—prevents distributed control from dissolving responsibility: where control over one practice is split across Devaswom Boards, local self-government bodies and festival committees, each duty-bearer must coordinate with the others in discharging its own obligations.
Organised users (festival committees, resident associations, local river-user groups, business associations)	Material control over the practices that cause the injury; the criterion is control, not membership. A festival committee controlling the layout, timing and waste-management arrangements of a major festival exercises such control	Compliance duties on the same materiality criterion as institutional duty-bearers.
Communities	Beneficiaries of the public dimensions of the trust; the river’s integrity supports human use, livelihood, cultural practice and well-being	Participation—in legally structured ways—in monitoring, complaints procedures and restoration planning. These are public-law procedural rights, not equitable rights in the river itself; communities are not co-trustees in the same sense as the State.
Individuals	Ordinary statutory and regulatory obligations	Unaffected. Institutional duties supplement individual liability rather than displacing it, capturing cumulative injuries that individual liability cannot.

7.4. Community Obligations: Beneficiaries, Operators, Individuals

Community obligations require a sharper definition than the conventional language of stewardship supplies, and three more limited positions specify them. Communities are not co-trustees in the same sense as the State. The three positions are set out in Table 1. Community obligation is therefore a conduct-specific obligation within a public framework, not a free-floating ethical demand.

7.5. Standing, Breach and Forum

Standing under sacred public trust follows from the doctrinal choice not to confer legal personality on the river. The doctrine therefore differs from the declaratory personhood approach adopted by the Uttarakhand High Court in Mohd. Salim, and instead relies on representation through existing constitutional and statutory routes. In that procedural respect, the Yarra and Atrato models remain relevant comparators, although they employ different legal forms. The river does not sue in its own name. Under Article 226, public-spirited litigants, affected residents, local bodies and civil-society organisations may, where the applicable requirements are satisfied, challenge an alleged failure by a trustee or other legally grounded duty-bearer. Article 32 is available where the proceeding seeks enforcement of a right conferred by Part III. Indian courts have broadly construed standing in public-interest litigation since the 1980s.56 The procedural rights dimension of Indian environmental law has been extensively mapped in the scholarly literature (Ghosh 2019b). Sacred public trust does not create a new river-standing doctrine; it supplies the substantive public-trust argument advanced through existing procedural routes.

Rajamani has raised structural concerns about PIL’s tendency to substitute judicial governance for executive governance through endless supervisory jurisdiction (Rajamani 2007a, pp. 315–17); the doctrine proposed here is responsive to that concern because it locates the duties of integrity and restoration on the State as primary trustee and other legally grounded duty-bearers rather than on the court and confines the judicial role to articulation, review, supervision and correction. Sacred public trust uses PIL as a vehicle for accessing the constitutional architecture. The National Green Tribunal’s jurisdiction remains statutory. Under Section 14 of the NGT Act 2010, the Tribunal has jurisdiction over civil cases involving a substantial question relating to the environment where that question arises out of the implementation of an enactment specified in Schedule I. Section 15 authorises relief, compensation and restitution; Section 16 provides specified appellate jurisdiction; and Section 18 governs applications and appeals (NGT Act 2010, ss 14–18 and Schedule I). A cumulative river-injury dispute may therefore come before the Tribunal only where the applicable statutory requirements are satisfied. Sacred public trust may inform the legal argument in a dispute properly before the Tribunal, but it does not, in itself, confer jurisdiction.

Breach must be stated with precision, and the doctrine identifies four forms, each calibrated to the protected interests defined in Section 7.1, and Table 2 sets them out.

Table 2. Forms of breach under the proposed doctrine.

Form of Breach	A Breach Occurs Where
Unlawful authorisation	A trustee or other legally grounded duty-bearer authorises, permits or fails to restrain conduct that materially impairs the river’s integrity.
Failure to exercise	A trustee or duty-bearer fails to exercise an existing statutory power reasonably necessary to prevent or reduce a known pattern of cumulative river harm.
Inadequate conditioning	Conditions or management arrangements imposed on a river-affecting activity are manifestly inadequate to protect the river.
Restoration failure	Injury having been established, the responsible actor fails to initiate, cooperate in or comply with proportionate restoration.

The standard across all four forms is fiduciary reasonableness, assessed by reference to the public fiduciary purpose directed to river integrity and restoration. For the proposed doctrine, the relevant considerations are the materiality and foreseeability of the injury, the legal source and scope of the duty-bearer’s responsibility, the extent of its control over the relevant practice, and the proportionality of the response reasonably required.

The forum follows the existing legal architecture, summarised in Table 3. Administrative decisions remain reviewable through ordinary public law procedures, and the choice of forum depends on the legal source of the duty, the cause of action, and the relief sought.

Table 3. Forum, route and condition.

Forum	Route	Condition
High Courts	Article 226	Subject to the applicable rules of jurisdiction and maintainability.
Supreme Court	Article 32	The proceeding must seek enforcement of a right conferred by Part III.
National Green Tribunal	NGT Act 2010, ss 14–18 and Schedule I	Only where the applicable statutory requirements are satisfied; the doctrine may inform the argument but does not confer jurisdiction.

7.6. Remedies

The remedial structure of sacred public trust is shaped by the form of the injury and the nature of the protected interests, and three structural features determine it: the injury is cumulative; the duty-bearers are heterogeneous; the protected interest is the river’s integrity and restoration, not merely public use, administrative regularity or compensation after harm. The remedial inquiry must be directed to legal forms capable of preventing, repairing and supervising river-centred injury. Each remedy remains subject to the jurisdiction and remedial powers of the forum in which the claim is brought.

Supervisory jurisdiction of this kind has Indian precedent. The Ganga pollution litigation supplies the judicial form, in the continuing supervision that the literature calls continuing mandamus; T.N. Godavarman supplies the institutional form in the expert committees each State was directed to constitute to identify the protected object and in the standing committee directed to oversee compliance and file status reports. The remedies set out above draw on both: the reporting and disclosure duties and the continuing supervisory jurisdiction in Table 4 are the fiduciary analogues of that machinery. Natali and Hall’s restorative account of environmental victimisation supplies the conceptual basis for treating restoration, rather than compensation, as the primary remedial form (Natali and Hall 2021; Peacock 2025). The doctrine is restorative in orientation, and the remedies are calibrated accordingly.

Table 4. Remedies, the duties they give effect to, and their limits.

Remedy	Duty It Gives Effect to	Scope and Limit
Quashing or varying permissions	The negative trustee duty of non-impairment	Available where an authorisation would, if implemented, cause material impairment; the defect is then not merely procedural. Permissions, licences or sanctions materially inconsistent with river integrity may be quashed or varied.
Mandatory conditions on permitted activities	Positive trustee duties, specified at the point of authorisation	May govern festival use, discharges, sanitation, waste management, and clean-up, including—where necessary—financial security for clean-up. Conditions must be proportionate to foreseeable injury and sufficient to prevent material impairment; a permission that merely records administrative compliance while leaving river injury unaddressed does not satisfy the doctrine.
Restoration plans with measurable benchmarks	Restoration as a protected interest, converted into a measurable remedial obligation	May be required of the responsible actor, the primary trustee, another legally grounded duty-bearer, or both. Must create standards capable of judicial or tribunal review, not merely announce remedial intention.
Removal of obstructions and encroachments	The restoration interest, given physical effect where prospective restraint is insufficient	Unlawful obstructions or encroachments on riverbanks, floodplains or wetlands may be removed. Costs may be allocated to an actor whose legal responsibility is established, where the forum has authority to so order.
Reporting and disclosure duties	Supervisability of the other remedies	Applies where information held by a trustee or duty-bearer is material to monitoring, restoration or future protection; disclosure is part of the remedial structure, not an ancillary obligation.
Continuing supervisory jurisdiction	Compliance with prevention, restoration, disclosure and monitoring obligations over time	Available where restoration cannot otherwise be secured. Bounded by the remedies ordered; does not convert the forum into a free-standing river manager.
Compensation	Available where the statute allows	A monetary payment alone cannot address cumulative river injury; the remedial sequence runs from restraint, through repair, to monitored compliance.

Ecocide and sacred public trust pursue structurally parallel projects, and their relationship is comparative-institutional rather than competitive. The Stop Ecocide International draft definition (Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide 2021) and the wider ecocide literature treat environmental harm as injury rather than as nuisance or regulatory breach and seek to make ecological harm legally cognisable as a wrong against the environment itself. This article does not rely on ecocide as a doctrinal source in India for three reasons: ecocide is not currently part of Indian positive law; criminal-law reform of the kind ecocide envisages requires legislative action that is not on the immediate Indian agenda; and sacred public trust reconstructs existing Indian constitutional and fiduciary doctrine rather than requiring new criminal categories. The choice between the two routes is therefore comparative-institutional rather than a rejection of ecocide scholarship. The two routes are complementary in principle: a fiduciary route through existing constitutional doctrine, and a criminal route through future legislation. The argument here is that the fiduciary route is presently the more institutionally available.

7.7. Doctrine in Practice: A Thrissur Application

Sacred public trust operates through existing public-law institutions rather than replacing them. Its practical effect is to require permissions, enforcement, and restoration decisions to be assessed against river integrity and restoration as the protected fiduciary purpose, rather than only against human welfare, nuisance or administrative regularity.

A festival-permission dispute in Thrissur illustrates the redescription of facts this article draws on, close to the empirical record. Suppose a local authority grants permission for a major river-adjacent festival involving temporary structures on the bank, ritual bathing, substantial waste generation, and inadequate sanitation arrangements. Within an orthodox framework, the challenge is likely to be framed as a nuisance, public order management, or non-compliance with generic municipal conditions. Each of those framings misdescribes the wrong. They locate it in the disturbance to human users rather than in the injury the river sustains, with the consequence that a permission satisfying every one of them may leave that injury wholly unaddressed. Under the sacred public trust, the same permission is vulnerable on more exact grounds. The legal question is whether the permission and the institutional practices it authorises are consistent with the river’s integrity and restoration as protected fiduciary interests.

Where the claim is properly before the relevant forum, three doctrinal questions arise, each mapping a section of this article onto a litigable test: first, are the permission conditions adequate to protect the river’s integrity (testing the State’s negative duty under 7.2 and the inadequate-conditioning breach under 7.5)? Second, have the Cochin Devaswom Board or other institutions exercising material control discharged their duties of prevention and clean-up (testing the practice-specific duties under 7.3)? Third, is the post-event restoration plan proportionate to the foreseeable burden imposed on the river (testing the restoration-plan remedy under 7.6)? The available remedies include variation or quashing of the permission, mandatory conditions on any permission granted, clean-up requirements secured by deposit, riverbank restoration, disclosure obligations and follow-up monitoring. The claim is neither symbolic personhood nor an ordinary nuisance: it is a fiduciary failure in the management of a river-centred risk.

The same test applies across the five forms of cumulative injury identified in Section 2.3: existing permissions and enforcement powers remain in place but are assessed against the river-centred fiduciary purpose.

A recent Indian authority confirms that public-trust protection is not confined to naturally occurring water bodies. In Swacch Association, Nagpur v State of Maharashtra,57 the Supreme Court held that the public trust doctrine extends to man-made or artificially created water bodies. It upheld the High Court’s prospective directions against structures of a permanent nature within Futala Lake and requiring the lake’s protection and maintenance.58 At the same time, it accepted on the evidence before it that the viewer’s gallery had not been shown to have an adverse ecological effect, that the floating restaurant, banquet and platform could not be categorised as permanent constructions, and that the artificial banyan-tree structure was not permanent. The decision does not establish sacred public trust, and the argument here does not need it to. Its relevance is narrower and precise: public-trust protection is not fixed by the provenance of the water body, so a doctrine organised around a river’s ecological condition does not strain the established reach of the trust.

8. Conclusions

Indian river-protection law contains substantial constitutional, statutory and remedial machinery, but cumulative ecological injury remains only partially legible because that machinery is organised around human interests, public uses, discrete sources or legal status. Sacred public trust addresses that gap by making river integrity and, where injury has occurred, restoration, the organising public fiduciary purpose.

The reconstruction is anchored in M.C. Mehta v Kamal Nath: the public trust already extends to ecosystems and imposes a duty to protect natural resources. Sacred public trust supplies the standard left underdeveloped there by directing that duty to the ecological integrity and restoration of the river, while respecting the judgement’s institutional limits. The State remains the primary trustee; other institutions bear duties only where legally structured responsibility and material control justify them. Institutional materiality, ecological translatability and constitutional plurality constrain those duties. Existing public-law routes supply standing, forum and remedies, so neither river personhood nor a new criminal-law category is required.

The contribution is consequently limited but distinct. Sacred public trust offers rights-of-nature scholarship a non-personhood route grounded in existing fiduciary doctrine and offers Indian environmental constitutionalism a river-centred way to connect public trust, environmental supervision and ecological scope. It does not displace Article 21 or solve questions of funding and dedicated guardianship that legislation could address. Its claim is that a purpose-based reconstruction is doctrinally available and can make cumulative river injury more directly cognisable through prevention, institutional responsibility and restoration.