Funeral Pyres And Article 25: The Unlitigated Conflict Between Religious Cremation Rites And Air Quality Law
Ms. Shamayeeta Dey, LLM (Human Rights), AIALS, Amity University, Noida. Uttar Pradesh.
ABSTRACT
India litigates its smoke selectively. Firecrackers are dragged before the Supreme Court every autumn, weighed, restricted, and rationed by decibel and hour. The funeral pyre, a source of comparable, and by some measures greater, particulate emission has never once been asked to answer for itself. This essay begins from that asymmetry and treats it not as coincidence but as diagnosis: a marker of how selectively Indian environmental jurisprudence chooses which religious smoke is worth regulating and which is left, quite literally, to burn.
The numbers are not marginal. Delhi's fifty-one cremation grounds alone were estimated, in a 2022 emissions inventory, to release close to four hundred tonnes of PM2.5 a year, with ambient readings at some sites running several multiples over India's permissible limit. Researchers tracing COVID- 19's second wave even found measurable mortality correlated with pyre- driven air quality collapse in the capital. The NGT noticed this in passing as early as 2016 then the question simply stopped being asked. No case has tested cremation against the Air Act using the very doctrine firecrackers failed to survive intact in Arjun Gopal v. Union of India: the essential religious practice test.
This essay does not propose to touch the right to cremate, nor does it treat Hindu funerary rites as a pollution problem dressed in ritual language. Its target is narrower and, I argue, doctrinally cleaner: the gap between the right to cremate, which the essential-practice doctrine plainly protects and the method by which that right is exercised, which the doctrine was never asked to protect and which case law offers no reason to believe it would.
Keywords: Article 25; Essential Religious Practice; Air Quality Law; Environmental Jurisprudence; Cremation Emissions; Selective Constitutional Scrutiny.
