Environmental and Development-Induced Crime (Unit I)

Michael Lynch coined green criminology in 1990, reading environmental destruction through radical criminology's lens on political economy. Piers Beirne and Nigel South's 2007 volume then reframed the field around harm rather than statutory crime alone: green criminology studies damage against humanity, animals and the environment, whether or not the conduct causing it is illegal.

This matters for both syllabus bullets. Environmental crimes and development-induced crime are usually taught as two separate lines in the syllabus, but NET examiners tend to test whether you know they share one framework: an act can be perfectly lawful (a permitted discharge, an approved dam) and still count as the kind of harm green criminology exists to name.

For MCQ purposes, the coinage year (Lynch, 1990) and the defining text (Beirne and South, 2007) are the two facts most likely to be tested directly.

A narrower, statutory layer of environmental crime covers conduct already illegal under law: industrial pollution above a permitted limit, illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, and illegal waste dumping. In India these fall mainly under the Water Act, 1974, the Air Act, 1981, the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, with the National Green Tribunal, set up under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010, hearing environmental disputes on a fast-track basis.

A second, broader layer is legal but harmful conduct: a mining operation with every required licence can still destroy a watershed, and a permitted volume of emissions can still cause harm that falls hardest on communities who had no say in setting that permit. Nigel South's argument is that this gap is structural, not accidental: industries with the greatest capacity to cause harm also have the greatest capacity to shape the permits that govern them.

The exam-relevant distinction to hold in memory is simple: a question describing a breach of a specific statute is asking about environmental crime in the narrow sense; a question describing a fully licensed activity that still damages an ecosystem is asking about the legal-but-harmful category the harm-based framework was built to cover.

Large infrastructure and extractive projects, dams, mines, highways and plantations, routinely require moving the people already living on the land. Green criminology treats the resulting displacement and dispossession as a form of harm even where the project is lawfully approved, and treats the criminalisation of communities that resist it as a second, linked harm.

The standard case for a written answer is the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river, which displaced tens of thousands of people across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. The Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by Medha Patkar from 1985, challenged the project in Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India (2000), in which the Supreme Court of India allowed construction to continue, holding that the project's benefits outweighed the displacement harm given the rehabilitation measures in place.

For a comparative example, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People in Nigeria's Niger Delta campaigned against oil pollution and land damage from Shell's operations; its leader Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by a military tribunal in November 1995, a case widely cited as environmental protest being criminalised with a lethal outcome.

Ronald Kramer and Raymond Michalowski developed state-corporate crime from 1990 onward to describe harm arising when a government institution and a corporation pursue a shared goal in direct cooperation. This is the framework NET expects you to apply when a question combines licensing failure with corporate conduct, because neither large-scale extraction nor large-scale infrastructure happens without state involvement: licensing, land acquisition, and often direct investment.

The Bhopal gas disaster of December 1984, where a leak of methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide plant killed thousands, is the standard Indian example analysed as state-facilitated corporate crime, since weak safety regulation let a hazardous process operate next to a dense residential area. Brazil's Brumadinho tailings dam collapse in January 2019, which killed 272 people, is a second example where a prior safety approval sat inside the causal chain.

The exam-relevant point is the framework's core move: it treats the state as an active participant in the harm through its licensing and enforcement choices, not as a neutral referee standing outside the corporate conduct.