The Supreme Court intervenes to ‘clean’ Vellore tanneries
Right to clean environment in neoliberal and Hindutva India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17825522 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sanghamitra Padhy (Ramapo College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-16 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-28 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2325-1042 • E-ISSN: 2325-1042 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/23251042.2026.2662071 |
| OpenAlex | W7157227460 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
The Indian Supreme Court’s efforts to clean Vellore’s tanneries have failed remarkably despite rulings in 1996 and 2025. Despite the Court’s claims to the right to a clean environment, the reality is that pollution follows laborers everywhere across the leather supply chain – it is not site-specific but operates across multiple scales, from chromium mining in Adivasi lands to cow vigilante violence against Muslims to toxic labor in tanneries. While public discourse sees this as implementation failure, the problem lies in the Court’s narrow interpretation of the environment and pollution – dichotomizing nature and culture and treating pollution as point-source effluent discharge. This represents competing environmentalisms in neoliberal India: middle-class quality-of-life concerns versus environmentalism of the poor. The law, by sidestepping environmentalism of the poor, has produced nested hierarchies of environmental injustice: temporal, spatial, and epistemic hierarchies that normalize caste and religious violence while privileging middle-class values. The reliance on quantitative assessments of landholding sizes and total dissolved solids dehistoricizes tanneries and tannery labor, erasing the embodied experiences of Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis, and women laborers across the supply chain. Environmental justice requires recognizing pollution as caste violence requiring structural repair, not technical solutions or market mechanisms.
Environmental justice · Hindutva · Neoliberalism (international relations) · Politics · Supreme court · Work (physics) · Environmental law and policy · Skin Protection and Aging · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Documenting a Caste
Environmental Justice at the Crossroads
The Smell of Caste
Introduction Spaces of Environmental Justice
Transforming skin, changing caste
Beyond Distribution and Proximity
India's Middle Classes and the Environment
The violence of odors
The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes
Neoliberal environmental justice
Theorising environmental justice
The Caste System Upside Down, or The Not-So-Mysterious East
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |