A Supreme Court judgment rarely reads like an indictment of an entire regulatory culture. The court’s ruling in the Shaliganga mining case came close.

Last August, the Supreme Court upheld the National Green Tribunal’s decision to halt riverbed mining in Budgam’s Shaliganga stream. The bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Atul S. Chandurkar delivered a clear message to the Jammu and Kashmir government, its environmental authorities and the construction firms that benefited from official approvals. Mining without scientific replenishment studies violates the law and damages rivers in ways that future generations will struggle to repair.

That finding matters far beyond one stream in Budgam.

Shaliganga exposed a deeper crisis inside Jammu and Kashmir’s mining governance. Government agencies approved large-scale extraction of sand, gravel and boulders without establishing whether the river possessed the capacity to recover. Authorities treated environmental clearance as paperwork rather than science. Construction companies extracted massive quantities of riverbed material while regulators looked elsewhere.

The Supreme Court called out that failure in unusually direct language. The judges stated that the Jammu and Kashmir Environmental Impact Assessment Authority compromised “regulatory integrity.” Courts seldom use such blunt phrasing unless institutional collapse becomes impossible to ignore.

The case began in 2022, when NKC Projects Pvt. Ltd., a Haryana-based company working on the Srinagar Semi Ring Road project, received permission to mine material from the Shaliganga stream. The semi ring road stretches nearly 62 kilometers and links Pampore to Ganderbal........

© Kashmir Observer