The Indian Supreme Court issues the final version of its order prohibiting mining in the Aravallis. The area affected is a 250 km stretch of the mountain range in the states of Haryana and Rajasthan, where concerns over the water table and the future of the mountain range itself have been raised by environmentalists. In recent years, the Indian Supreme Court has often been a leader in the realm of environmental protection. In 2000, the Supreme Court again ordered polluting factories in New Dehli to be shut down, sparking protests over the loss of jobs. The 2000 orders were an attempt to implement orders dating back to 1993. The Court has also taken the lead in the area of traffic pollution: in 1998 it required buses in Delhi to be fueled with compressed natural gas.

I would love to see a study that attempts to determine the effectiveness of the Court's action here. American political science literature tends to doubt the effectiveness of courts acting alone (see Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope, and Epp, The Rights Revolution). But in a conversation with me in Delhi in 2000, a former government official -- and a relative of my girlfriend -- argued that the Indian Supreme Court has been rather effective in creating a constituency for itself among ordinary people, and that it might consequently have a broader effect than courts in the American context. His argument was three fold: (1) the Court has the advantage of appearing less corrupt than the other branches of government, (2) it has explicitly seen itself as taking up the cause of the "public interest" in many cases, and (3) it has made broad use of the contempt power in an attempt to enforce (1).