The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to interfere in deforestation of Adani Group’s coal block project in Singrauli district of Madhya Pradesh, and questioned the petitioner over the delay in filing his petition.
Environmental activist Ajay Dubey moved to the Supreme Court after the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on April 22 dismissed his petition against the May 2025 clearance of Adani Group’s Mahan Energen Limited on the grounds of delay.
“Why all the delay. The original application filed by me was filed before the NGT on January 22,” a bench of Justices BS Narasimha and Alok Aradhye said.
Section 16 of the NGT Act allows challenges to orders of authorities within 30 days or within the next 60 days if there is sufficient cause for delay.
Advocate Siddharth Gupta, who represented Dubey, argued that this was an environmental issue and that the technical basis should not prevent the court from invoking its extraordinary constitutional power under Article 142 of the Constitution to review the clearance process.
The court suggested that Dubey raise the issue in a writ petition, to which Gupta agreed to withdraw the petition. “The petitioner seeks to withdraw the appeal… to avail other legal remedies if any,” his plea recorded.
Gupta confirmed that more than 600,000 trees will be cut in the dense evergreen forests of Singrauli, which was declared a “no-go” zone in 2011 and an elephant corridor. He said the coal block would negatively impact wildlife.
Gupta said the chief conservator of forests in Madhya Pradesh denied the first phase clearance because the area is home to leopards, jackals, wild bears, nilgai and elephants. Another committee, which later reviewed the proposal, granted permission to create the coal block.
“Someone needs to examine the viability of this deforestation,” Gupta said. Senior advocate A N S Nadkarni, representing the Adani Group, urged the court to dismiss the order.
The bench said the NGT had cited the Supreme Court’s order in Talli Gram Panchayat v. Union of India 2025, wherein it considered the restriction under Article 16 after examining the previous judgments and orders of the NGT. “The matter has been heard at length. In this case, we were concerned because it relates to an environmental issue.”
Gupta said the NGT calculated the limitation period from the date the order approving clearance was issued and uploaded on the website of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on May 10, 2025. He added that Section 16 states that the order must be “notified”.
Gupta said there was no way through which this matter could be communicated to the general public. He added that Dube learned about the removal order and decided to appeal it after residents protested against the project, and this was reported in the newspapers when deforestation began in December 2025.
Dubey’s petition said that other than the ministry’s website, there is no material on record to show that the fact of deforestation has been brought into the public domain at the request of the ministry or the beneficiary company.
The coal block has been allocated an area of 1,397.54 hectares under reserved and protected forest areas. “…the designated area is also a dense evergreen forest with an average forest canopy of 0.5 to 0.6” (medium dense to very dense forest), comprising very rich species of evergreen trees like sal, saguan, char, senda, etc.,” the petition said.
Dubey said the ministry had classified certain categories of dense forests in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2011-12 as ‘no-go areas’, where allotments for coal blocks and mining were considered absolutely impermissible in the larger environmental and public interest. “This list includes the dense Singrauli forests,” he said.
