Introduction
For two decades the Energy Conservation Act, 2001 was an unremarkable statute. It created a bureau, empowered the government to notify efficiency standards for appliances and buildings, and set energy-saving targets for large consumers through the Perform, Achieve and Trade mechanism.1 The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022 changed the statute’s character. Passed to give legislative effect to India’s commitments at the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties, it inserted into section 14 a power to “specify the carbon credit trading scheme,” authorised the government to require designated consumers to meet part of their energy needs from non-fossil sources, widened the building code to new classes of structure, extended energy-consumption standards to vehicles and vessels, and enlarged the penal consequences of non-compliance.2 The most consequential of these additions, the carbon-market power in clause (w) of section 14, is a single clause. Everything that makes a carbon market a market was left to be constructed by executive instrument.
That construction has since proceeded rapidly. The Ministry of Power notified the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, 2023 on 28 June 2023; it was amended on 19 December 2023 to add a voluntary offset mechanism; and in July 2024 the Bureau of Energy Efficiency issued a Detailed Procedure for the compliance mechanism, fixing the machinery of registration, verification, and certificate issuance.3 Emission-intensity targets are recommended through a National Steering Committee for the Indian Carbon Market and notified, significantly, by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, which issued the first sectoral targets in October 2025 and extended them to further sectors in January 2026; certificates are to be traded on the power exchanges under the oversight of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, with the Bureau as administrator and the Grid Controller of India operating the registry.4 A regime that will regulate several hundred million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent has thus been assembled almost entirely below the level of primary legislation.
This distribution of authority frames the problem the article addresses. Delegated legislation is not merely tolerated in the modern administrative state; it is indispensable, and Indian courts have said so repeatedly.5 But the carbon-market provisions do not delegate the execution of a policy Parliament has settled. They delegate the design of the policy: the stringency of the cap expressed as an intensity trajectory, the volume of certificates that will exist, the price consequence of falling short, and the identity of the obligated. These are the variables that determine who bears the cost of decarbonisation and how much. When a statute leaves them entirely to rules, two questions follow. First, does the delegation offend the constitutional prohibition on the abdication of essential legislative functions? Second, and more practically, if the delegation stands, what standard of review governs the rules that fill it, and which forum applies that standard?
The article’s central claim is that the two questions have very different answers, and that scholarship and litigation have tended to ask the first when they should be asking the second. On the first, the excessive-delegation doctrine, as it has evolved from In re Delhi Laws Act onward, is too accommodating to invalidate the section 14 delegation. It requires only that the legislature declare a policy and furnish standards or guidance, and it locates that guidance generously in preambles, long titles, and the general scheme of an Act.6 The Amendment’s stated purpose of meeting India’s climate commitments, coupled with the residual architecture of the 2001 Act, will comfortably meet that threshold. On the second, however, Indian law is unsettled. The grounds on which subordinate legislation may be challenged are established in principle but calibrated for implementing rules, not for instruments that constitute markets and create property-like entitlements; the reach of proportionality over economic delegated legislation is contested; the procedural obligations attaching to rule-making are thin; and the forum in which such challenges belong is, for this particular statute, genuinely uncertain because the Energy Conservation Act is not among the enactments over which the National Green Tribunal has jurisdiction.
The argument proceeds in eight further parts. Part II maps the delegation architecture of the Amendment and the instruments made under it, and locates each essential policy variable in the regulatory cascade. Part III restates the excessive-delegation doctrine and its permissive character. Part IV applies the doctrine to the 2022 delegation and explains why, despite genuine strain, it survives, while isolating the sub-delegation and cross-statute features that come closest to the constitutional line. Part V turns to the grounds and standards for reviewing the subordinate legislation itself and argues for a calibrated intensification of review for market-constituting instruments. Part VI addresses the forum problem created by the statute’s absence from Schedule I of the National Green Tribunal Act. Part VII draws comparative lessons from the United States and the European Union. Part VIII sets out the findings and a proposed standard of review, and Part IX concludes. The method is doctrinal, supplemented by a structured institutional mapping; a litigation-based empirical account is premature because the market is only now becoming operational, and the article is candid about that limit rather than manufacturing data to disguise it.
The delegation architecture of the 2022 Amendment
Understanding the constitutional stakes requires first seeing how little of the carbon market lives in the statute. The Amendment did four things of present relevance. It added clause (w) to section 14, empowering the Central Government to “specify the carbon credit trading scheme,” and, in a new section 14AA, correspondingly authorised the issue of Carbon Credit Certificates to registered entities that comply with the scheme.7 It empowered the government to direct that designated consumers meet a minimum share of consumption from non-fossil sources, and made failure to comply punishable with a monetary penalty.8 It extended the energy conservation building code to a wider set of buildings and introduced standards for vehicles and vessels. And it reconstituted the Bureau’s governing council, enlarging it from a body of twenty to twenty-six members into one of thirty-one to thirty-seven, and adjusted the penalty regime, including the factors an adjudicating officer must weigh.9 What the Amendment did not do is equally important. It did not fix any emissions cap or trajectory. It did not state the number, denomination, or lifespan of certificates. It did not prescribe how a compliance shortfall would be priced. It did not identify the obligated sectors or the baseline against which performance would be measured. Each of these was left to instruments yet to be made.
The instruments, when they came, did not sit in a single tier. They form a cascade. At the first level below the statute is the Scheme of 2023, itself delegated legislation notified under clause (w). The Scheme establishes the institutional scaffolding (the steering committee, the administrator, the registry, the market regulator) and defines the compliance and (after the December 2023 amendment) offset mechanisms in outline.10 At the second level is the Bureau’s Detailed Procedure of July 2024, which supplies the operative content: how obligated entities register, how emissions are monitored, reported, and verified, how certificates are issued and surrendered, and what accredited verifiers must satisfy.11 At a third and analytically distinct point sit the emission-intensity targets themselves, the single most important number in the system because it defines stringency. They are recommended through the steering committee and notified not under the Energy Conservation Act at all, but by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.12 Finally, the terms on which certificates are bought and sold fall to the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission, which notified trading regulations in February 2026 under its Electricity Act mandate.13 A single economic instrument is thus assembled from four legal sources under three parent statutes.
The point is not that layered rule-making is unusual; it is ubiquitous and often benign. The point is where the essential variables have come to rest. It is worth stating this precisely, because the constitutional question turns on it. The following inventory locates each policy-defining variable of the carbon market in the legal hierarchy, and notes the review channel that would apply to it.
| Policy variable | Legal locus | Primary review channel |
|---|---|---|
| Existence of a carbon market; power to issue certificates | Statute: ss. 14(w) and 14AA, EC Act 2001 (as amended 2022) | Excessive-delegation challenge in a writ court (Arts. 32/226); very likely to fail |
| Institutional design (administrator, registry, market regulator, steering committee) | CCTS, 2023 (delegated legislation under s. 14(w)) | Writ court; ultra vires / manifest arbitrariness |
| Registration, monitoring, reporting, verification, certificate issuance | Detailed Procedure, 2024 (sub-delegated to the Bureau) | Writ court; ultra vires parent Scheme; sub-delegation objection |
| Emission-intensity targets (the effective “cap”/stringency) | MoEFCC: GHG Emission Intensity Target Rules, 2025, under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 | Potentially the NGT (EP Act is a Schedule I enactment) or a writ court |
| Shortfall price / environmental compensation multiplier | GHG Emission Intensity Target Rules, 2025: compensation at twice the average certificate price, imposed by the CPCB | Potentially the NGT (EP Act is a Schedule I enactment) or a writ court; proportionality / arbitrariness |
| Terms of purchase and sale of certificates | CERC regulations, 2026, under the Electricity Act, 2003 | Validity: writ court only (PTC India); orders under them: Appellate Tribunal for Electricity, then Supreme Court |
| Penalty for non-compliance / non-fossil default | Statute: ss. 26, 28, EC Act (as amended) | Adjudicating officer; APTEL; writ court |
Table 1: Location of essential policy variables and their review channels.
Two features of this mapping drive the analysis that follows. First, the variable that most nearly amounts to legislative policy in an emissions-trading system, the stringency of the target, rests at the furthest remove from Parliament, in an executive notification issued under a statute other than the one that authorised the market. Second, review of the integrated instrument is not integrated; it is dispersed across writ courts, the electricity appellate tribunal, and potentially the environmental tribunal, according to which parent statute a given component happens to have been issued under. Both features are the product of drafting choices, and both are constitutionally salient.
The excessive-delegation doctrine: a permissive baseline
Indian constitutional law has never accepted an American-style prohibition on delegation, but neither has it embraced the British premise of unlimited parliamentary competence to delegate. The via media was fixed in In re Delhi Laws Act, where a fractured seven-judge bench agreed on a proposition that has governed ever since: the legislature may delegate widely, but it may not delegate its essential legislative function, which is the laying down of policy and its enactment into a binding rule of conduct.14 The reasoning rested on the structure of the Constitution rather than on any express clause; because Article 245 vests the legislative power in the legislature, that body cannot efface itself by handing the power wholesale to another.15 What survives delegation is everything ancillary: the filling in of detail, the application of policy to circumstance, the adjustment of subordinate machinery.
The test was refined but not tightened over the following decades. In Harishankar Bagla, the Court upheld broad control-order powers because the parent Act declared a discernible policy, the maintenance of supplies essential to the community, within which the executive was to act.16 In Vasantlal Maganbhai, it insisted that the legislature must enunciate its policy and provide a standard to guide the delegate, yet found such a standard implicit in the scheme of the Act under challenge.17 The high-water mark of judicial restraint came in Gwalior Rayon, where a central sales-tax rate fixed at ten per cent or at whatever rate a State applied to intra-State sales, whichever was higher, was upheld; Khanna J. articulated a “policy and guidelines” standard while Mathew J. preferred an even more permissive test asking only whether the legislature had abdicated, that is, had effaced itself entirely.18 On either formulation, the delegate’s discretion could be extremely broad so long as some legislative purpose could be identified to channel it.
The doctrine’s generosity is most visible in Registrar of Cooperative Societies v. K. Kunhambu, which sustained a near-Henry VIII clause empowering the government to exempt any society from any provision of the Act.19 Chinnappa Reddy J. acknowledged the “abundance of authority” and the persistent difficulty of the subject, but upheld the clause because the power had to be exercised to advance the policy and objects of the Act, according to guidelines that, the Court held, could be “gleaned from the preamble and other provisions” of the statute.20 The lesson of Kunhambu and its successors is that the guidance requirement is satisfied by objects and preambles, not only by operative standards, and that courts will strain to find policy rather than to condemn its absence. As the Court put it in St. John’s Teachers Training Institute, whether a delegation is excessive must be judged against the subject matter, the scheme, the provisions of the statute including its preamble, and the facts and circumstances of the enactment.21 Judicial deference is, in short, the default.
Deference is not total. The doctrine retains teeth, exercised sparingly. In Hamdard Dawakhana the Court struck down a power to add to a statutory list of diseases for which advertising was prohibited, because the parent Act supplied no principle to govern the additions; and in Harakchand Banthia it invalidated section 5(2)(b) of the Gold (Control) Act, 1968, which conferred on the Administrator a power to regulate the manufacture and distribution of gold that the Court found “legislative in character and extremely wide” and that, unlike the parallel rule-making power of the Central Government, was not subject to parliamentary scrutiny.22 These cases mark the outer boundary: a delegation fails not when it is broad but when the legislature has supplied nothing at all by which the delegate’s choice can be measured or the courts can review it. The boundary is genuine, but it is set low. A statute that states an objective and furnishes a scheme will clear it. That is the baseline against which the carbon-market delegation must be assessed.
Does the 2022 delegation survive the doctrine?
Measured against the baseline just described, a facial challenge to the section 14(w) delegation would fail, and it is worth being clear-eyed about why. The Amendment does not lack a policy. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons and the ministerial statements accompanying its passage tie it explicitly to the achievement of India’s commitments under the Paris Agreement and at the Glasgow conference, and to the decarbonisation of the economy through market instruments.23 That objective is at least as concrete as the maintenance of essential supplies upheld in Bagla, and considerably more concrete than the exemption power upheld in Kunhambu.24 The residual scheme of the 2001 Act (its definitions, its designation of consumers, its penalty and adjudication machinery, its appellate tribunal) supplies the structural channel within which the delegate must operate. On the settled test, guidance can readily be gleaned from the Act. A court applying Gwalior Rayon and St. John’s would uphold clause (w) without difficulty.
To stop there, however, would be to mistake the doctrine’s permissiveness for the absence of a problem. Three features of the delegation deserve scrutiny that the excessive-delegation doctrine, as presently framed, is ill-equipped to give. Each explains why the constitutional weight must shift from the validity of the delegation to the review of its exercise.
A. The delegated choice is constitutive, not executory
The doctrine was built for delegations that implement a legislative decision: fixing a tax rate within a policy, scheduling goods, exempting a class. The carbon-market delegation is different in kind. Setting the emission-intensity trajectory is not the application of a policy Parliament has made; it is the making of the policy. In an emissions-trading system the stringency of the target is the entire distributive question: it determines how much abatement the economy must achieve, which firms bear the cost, and what a tonne of carbon will be worth. Because the Amendment fixes no trajectory, the body that sets the target is not executing a legislative choice about how much India will decarbonise and at whose expense; it is originating it. The formal test does not capture this, because it asks only whether some policy exists to channel the delegate, not whether the operative policy, the one that allocates burdens, has been made by the legislature or left to the executive. A doctrine content with objects and preambles will find the former and overlook the latter.
This matters beyond the abstract because the instrument the executive is authorised to create is quasi-fiscal and property-like. A Carbon Credit Certificate is a tradeable entitlement denominated in a tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent; a shortfall obliges the defaulter to buy and surrender certificates or to pay an environmental compensation pegged to a multiple of the market price.25 Whether one characterises the certificate as property, licence, or sui generis entitlement, the creation of a transferable financial instrument with monetised compliance value is precisely the sort of choice the essential-functions rule was meant to reserve to the legislature. The creation of legal fictions by a delegate rather than by the legislature was the very vice condemned in Agricultural Market Committee v. Shalimar Chemical Works, where a rule that deemed a transaction to be a sale for the purpose of levy was struck down as beyond the Act; such a fiction, the Court held, could be created only by the legislature and not by a delegate exercising rule-making power.26 The carbon market is that vice at scale: an entire asset class, its supply, and its price consequence, called into being by subordinate instrument.
B. The essential variable is sub-delegated and displaced to another statute
Even accepting that clause (w) validly delegates to the Central Government, the target, which is the operative policy, is not set by the Government exercising the clause (w) power. It is developed through the Bureau’s Detailed Procedure and notified by a different ministry under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. This raises the distinct objection of sub-delegation. The maxim delegatus non potest delegare holds that a statutory power must be exercised by the repository in whom the legislature confided it, unless sub-delegation is authorised by express words or necessary implication.27 In Sahni Silk Mills, the Court accepted that the maxim is not applied to its extreme in the modern administrative state, but insisted that sub-delegation must be traceable to the parent statute and that policy must be indicated in the statute within whose framework the sub-delegate acts.28 The question, then, is whether the Energy Conservation Act authorises the government to route the determination of intensity targets through the Bureau’s procedure and a notification under another Act. The answer is not obvious, and it has not been tested.
The cross-statute feature is more troubling still. The Environment (Protection) Act confers on the Central Government a general power to take measures to protect and improve the environment; it was not enacted to authorise the calibration of a trading scheme created under a separate statute. Using an EP Act notification to fix the single most consequential number in a market established under the Energy Conservation Act is, at best, an ingenious act of statutory bricolage; at worst it is the location of the operative policy in an instrument whose parent statute never contemplated it, thereby insulating that policy from the interpretive discipline of the Act that actually created the market. A challenger could plausibly argue that the target is either ultra vires the EP Act (which does not speak to carbon markets) or, if intra vires the EC Act, is being made by the wrong repository under the wrong power. Neither argument is a certain winner. But their availability shows that the constitutional interest in accountable policy-making is not vindicated merely because clause (w) is a valid delegation.
C. The controls that should substitute for legislative specification are weak
Where a legislature delegates broadly, the standard justification is that other controls (parliamentary oversight through laying, procedural discipline in rule-making, and judicial review of the rules) will supply the accountability that specification would otherwise provide. In this regime those substitutes are thin. The laying requirement of the 2001 Act obliges the government to place rules before Parliament, but laying in India is a notoriously feeble control: the House rarely modifies or annuls, and the requirement is ordinarily directory rather than mandatory, so that non-compliance does not by itself invalidate a rule.29 The Energy Conservation Act contains no general statutory obligation of pre-publication consultation for scheme-making beyond consultation with the Bureau itself; the public consultation that preceded the 2023 Scheme was a matter of executive grace rather than legal duty.30 And, as Part VI shows, the forum best equipped to bring environmental and techno-economic expertise to bear on the rules, the National Green Tribunal, has no jurisdiction over the Energy Conservation Act. The combined effect is that the ordinary reasons for tolerating a broad delegation are, here, partly absent. The delegation survives; the safeguards that make survival tolerable are underdeveloped.
The conclusion of this Part is therefore double-edged. A facial excessive-delegation challenge to clause (w) should and would fail, and litigants who pin their hopes on invalidating the enabling clause misread the doctrine. But the features that make the delegation constitutionally uncomfortable, namely its constitutive character, its sub-delegated and displaced operative variable, and its weak accompanying controls, do not disappear because the gateway is passed. They reappear as reasons to review the rules themselves more searchingly than Indian courts ordinarily review subordinate legislation. It is to that review that the article now turns.
Reviewing the subordinate legislation: grounds and standards
If the constitutional action lies downstream, the threshold question is what may be urged against the rules once made. Indian law answers generously in principle. In Indian Express Newspapers, the Court held that a piece of subordinate legislation does not enjoy the immunity of a statute passed by a competent legislature, and may be challenged on all the grounds on which plenary legislation can be challenged and on additional grounds besides: that it does not conform to the parent Act, that it is contrary to some other statute, or that it is unreasonable in the sense of being manifestly arbitrary; and any notification, being itself “law” under Article 13, falls if it offends a fundamental right.31 Subordinate legislation is thus doubly exposed: to the constitutional grounds that reach all law, and to the administrative-law grounds that reach only delegated instruments. The difficulty is not the availability of grounds but their calibration.
A. Ultra vires and the boundaries of the parent power
The most orthodox control is that a rule may not exceed or contradict the statute under which it is made. Agricultural Market Committee is the paradigm: a rule creating a deeming fiction unsupported by the Act was struck down as beyond its scope.32 Applied to the carbon market, this ground is potent precisely because so much has been done by instrument. If the Detailed Procedure creates obligations or entitlements that the Scheme does not authorise, or if the Scheme travels beyond clause (w), the excess is vulnerable. The sub-delegation point developed above is a species of the same objection: a power sub-delegated without authority is exercised ultra vires. The ground is real, but it is also technical and self-limiting; it polices whether the executive stayed within its lane, not whether the lane leads anywhere sensible. For a regime whose defining choices were deliberately left to the executive, an ultra vires inquiry will often conclude that the executive was, formally, authorised to choose as it did.
B. Manifest arbitrariness
The more searching ground is manifest arbitrariness. The Court in Khoday Distilleries held that delegated legislation, though not necessarily subject to the tests of arbitrariness that apply to executive action, may be struck down where it is manifestly arbitrary: “a law which could not be reasonably expected to emanate from an authority delegated with the law-making power.”33 That standard was decisively deployed in Cellular Operators Association v. TRAI, where the Court invalidated a regulation compelling operators to compensate consumers for call drops, holding both that subordinate legislation may be assailed on every ground available against plenary legislation and that the impugned regulation was ultra vires the parent Act, manifestly arbitrary under Article 14, and an unreasonable restriction on the freedom to carry on business under Article 19(1)(g).34 The elevation of manifest arbitrariness into a free-standing ground against plenary legislation was confirmed in Shayara Bano, where Nariman J. (for himself and Lalit J.) described as manifestly arbitrary what is done “capriciously, irrationally and/or without adequate determining principle,” or what is “excessive and disproportionate,” and applied the test to the statutory recognition of instant triple talaq.35 Manifest arbitrariness is the natural vehicle for a substantive challenge to carbon-market rules: a target set without a rational basis in abatement potential, a shortfall price fixed without regard to the cost it imposes, or a sectoral coverage that burdens some emitters while sparing comparably situated others could each be attacked as arbitrary.
Yet the ground carries a built-in reticence. “Manifest” is a demanding modifier; the Court has repeatedly warned that the threshold is high and that courts will not sit in appeal over the policy wisdom of a delegate.36 For rules that merely implement, that reticence is appropriate. For rules that constitute a market and allocate its burdens, it is less obviously so. The argument of this article is that the intensity of manifest-arbitrariness review should track the constitutive character of the instrument: the more a delegated rule makes the operative policy choice that the statute withheld from the legislature, the less deference it should attract, because the ordinary justification for deference (that the legislature has already made the policy and the delegate is merely filling detail) does not hold. This is not a new ground; it is a principled modulation of an existing one, and it follows directly from the reasoning of Indian Express Newspapers, which withheld from subordinate legislation the immunity that flows from democratic enactment precisely because such legislation is not democratically enacted.37
C. Proportionality and its uncertain reach
Proportionality entered Indian administrative law in Om Kumar, which distinguished the review of administrative action affecting fundamental freedoms (proportionality) from the review of administrative discretion generally (Wednesbury unreasonableness).38 It matured in Modern Dental College, which adopted a structured four-part test (legitimate aim, suitability, necessity or least-restrictive means, and balancing) for measures restricting rights under Article 19, and was consolidated by Puttaswamy and Anuradha Bhasin.39 The reach of that test over economic delegated legislation is, however, unsettled. Carbon-market rules restrict the freedom to carry on trade under Article 19(1)(g) and differentiate among emitters in ways that engage Article 14; on the face of it, proportionality should apply. But Indian courts have been reluctant to subject economic regulation to full proportionality review, preferring a deferential reasonableness inquiry that leaves policy latitude to the executive.
There is a coherent middle path, and the carbon market is a good occasion to mark it. Proportionality need not be deployed with the same rigour against every economic rule; but where a delegated instrument both restricts a protected freedom and embodies the operative policy choice withheld from the legislature, the necessity and balancing prongs do real work. A court could accept the legitimacy of the decarbonisation aim and the suitability of a market mechanism, while asking whether a particular target, coverage rule, or penalty multiplier is the least restrictive means of achieving the aim and whether its burden on a class of emitters is proportionate to the abatement it secures. That inquiry disciplines the exercise of delegated power without usurping it, and it is consistent with Cellular Operators, which, adopting the classic test of Chintaman Rao, asked whether a regulation’s restriction of the freedom of trade was “arbitrary or of an excessive nature, beyond what is required in the interests of the public.”40 The alternative, full deference on the ground that carbon pricing is “policy,” would immunise from meaningful review the very choices that the legislature declined to make itself, compounding the accountability deficit rather than curing it.
D. Procedural review as the underused control
The most promising avenue may be procedural rather than substantive. Where a statute delegates the design of a market, the legitimacy of the resulting rules depends heavily on the process by which they were made: whether affected parties were consulted, whether their submissions were considered, and whether the rule-maker gave reasons. Indian law does not yet impose a general duty of consultation on subordinate legislation, and the Energy Conservation Act imposes none in terms. But the trajectory of the case law (Cellular Operators’s insistence on a reasoned, evidence-based justification for regulation, and the broader turn toward reason-giving as a facet of non-arbitrariness) supports reading into market-constituting rule-making an obligation to consult meaningfully and to respond to material objections.41 A target notification unaccompanied by a published methodology, or a coverage decision that ignores comparably situated sectors without explanation, would be exposed on this ground even if its substance lay within the executive’s policy latitude. Procedural review has the additional virtue of respecting the separation of powers: it improves the quality and accountability of the delegate’s choice without substituting the court’s choice for it. For a regime whose statutory and parliamentary controls are weak, procedural discipline is the safeguard most worth strengthening.
The forum problem: who reviews, and with what powers?
A standard of review is only as effective as the forum that applies it, and here the regime has an unusual defect. The obvious forum for environmental rule-making is the National Green Tribunal, a specialised body with expert members created to bring scientific competence to environmental adjudication.42 Yet the Tribunal’s original jurisdiction under section 14 of its Act extends only to civil disputes raising a substantial question relating to the environment that arises from the implementation of the enactments listed in Schedule I. Schedule I contains exactly seven statutes: the Water Act, 1974; the Water Cess Act, 1977; the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980; the Air Act, 1981; the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991; and the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.43 The Energy Conservation Act is not among them. On the plain terms of the statute, therefore, the Tribunal has no jurisdiction over disputes arising from the Energy Conservation Act or the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme made under it.
That omission is compounded by a limit on the Tribunal’s powers even within its jurisdiction. The Supreme Court held in Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board v. Sterlite that the Tribunal is a creature of statute that does not exercise the general power of judicial review possessed by the constitutional courts.44 Although Ankita Sinha subsequently upheld a wide suo motu competence, reading the Tribunal’s remit purposively as an instrument for enforcing the right to a healthy environment under Article 21, it did so within the four corners of the Schedule I subject matter and expressly against the backdrop of Sterlite’s denial of general review power.45 Sterlite itself held that the Tribunal, exercising its appellate jurisdiction, cannot strike down rules or regulations, and the Tribunal has accordingly been understood to lack the power to pronounce on the vires of rules and regulations, even those made under Schedule I enactments. That limit would in any event exclude a challenge to the carbon-market instruments on validity grounds.
Where, then, does review lie? For components issued under the Energy Conservation Act (the Scheme itself, and the Bureau’s Detailed Procedure) the answer is the writ jurisdiction of the High Courts under Article 226 and, exceptionally, of the Supreme Court under Article 32. That jurisdiction cannot be ousted; L. Chandra Kumar establishes that the power of judicial review vested in the High Courts and the Supreme Court is a basic feature of the Constitution that no tribunalisation can displace.46 For the emission-intensity targets, the position is curiously different: because they are notified under the Environment (Protection) Act, which is a Schedule I enactment, a challenge framed as a substantial environmental question arising from that Act might fall within the Tribunal’s jurisdiction, subject to the vires limitation just noted. And for the terms of trading, orders made under the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission’s regulations carry their own appellate route to the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity and thence to the Supreme Court, although the validity of the regulations themselves can be questioned only in judicial review before the constitutional courts.47
The upshot is a genuinely fragmented and partly incoherent scheme of review, illustrated in the final column of Table 1. A single, integrated carbon market, conceived and operated as one instrument, has been split for jurisdictional purposes according to the accident of which parent statute each component was issued under. The specialised environmental tribunal, which possesses exactly the interdisciplinary competence that carbon-market disputes demand, is largely shut out; the writ courts, which retain plenary review, lack that competence and are ill-suited to the technical evaluation of abatement methodologies and target-setting; and the same integrated policy may be tested in different fora depending on the component impugned, with attendant risks of inconsistency and forum-shopping. This is not a necessary consequence of delegation. It is a consequence of drafting the market into a statute that Parliament chose not to place within the environmental tribunal’s jurisdiction, and of routing its most important variable into yet another statute. The forum problem is, in that sense, the institutional shadow of the delegation problem.
Comparative perspectives
India’s difficulty is not unique, and two mature systems illuminate the choices available. Neither offers a template for transplant; both clarify the stakes.
A. The United States: from nondelegation to major questions
The United States nominally maintains a nondelegation doctrine but has, for nearly a century, enforced it only through the undemanding requirement that Congress supply an “intelligible principle.” In Gundy v. United States, a plurality declined to revive a stricter doctrine, though a bloc of Justices signalled willingness to do so.48 What the Court did instead, in West Virginia v. EPA, was to deploy the “major questions” doctrine: where an agency claims authority to decide a question of vast economic and political significance, a court will not infer that authority from ambiguous or general statutory language but will insist on clear congressional authorisation.49 The doctrine is a canon of statutory construction rather than a constitutional prohibition, but it performs a nondelegation function by demanding that the most consequential choices be made, or at least clearly authorised, by the legislature rather than assumed by the executive.
The relevance to the Indian carbon market is direct, though it must be handled with care. A national emissions-trading regime is a paradigm of the “major question”: a decision of vast economic and political significance affecting a fundamental sector of the economy. In the American frame, an agency could not conjure such a scheme from a general grant; it would need clear authorisation. India’s clause (w) is a clear authorisation to create a carbon market, so the major-questions objection to the market’s existence does not arise. But the doctrine’s deeper intuition, that the significance of a delegated choice should raise the level of legislative specificity a court expects and lower the deference a court extends, maps onto the argument of Parts IV and V. India need not, and should not, import a rigid nondelegation rule; the excessive-delegation doctrine’s flexibility is a strength in a developmental state. What it can borrow is the insight that constitutive, economy-wide delegated choices warrant heightened rather than reflexive scrutiny of their exercise. The American experience also warns of the doctrine’s cost: uncertainty, and a temptation for courts to substitute their own judgment for the agency’s under the guise of demanding clarity. The lesson is one of calibration, not adoption.
B. The European Union: essential parameters in the legislative instrument
The European Union took the opposite drafting path and thereby avoided much of India’s difficulty. The Emissions Trading Scheme was established not by executive instrument but by a Directive of the Parliament and Council, which fixed the scheme’s scope, its core mechanisms, and the framework for allowances and penalties in the legislative text itself.50 The essential parameters (what the scheme covers, how allowances are allocated in principle, what non-compliance costs) were, to a substantial degree, legislative choices, with delegated and implementing acts confined to technical elaboration within tightly drawn limits. Judicial review of the scheme has accordingly focused on the validity of the legislative choices under general principles of Union law. In Arcelor Atlantique, the Court of Justice tested the Directive’s inclusion of the steel sector, and its exclusion of chemicals and non-ferrous metals, against the principle of equal treatment, upholding the scheme on the ground that a novel and complex measure could legitimately be introduced in stages while acknowledging that the legislature’s discretion is not unlimited and remains subject to proportionality.51 Legal-basis and proportionality challenges have continued at the legislative level, notably over the alignment of the scheme with the Treaty provisions governing measures that significantly affect a Member State’s energy mix.52
The contrast is instructive. Because the European legislature embedded the scheme’s essential parameters in primary law, the accountability and review of those parameters occur at the legislative level, where democratic responsibility is clearest and where the Court applies well-developed principles of proportionality and equal treatment to the legislative act. India has done the reverse: it embedded almost nothing in primary law and left the essential parameters to a cascade of subordinate instruments, thereby pushing the accountability question into administrative-law review of rules, review that, as Parts V and VI show, is under-theorised and fragmented. The European model does not prove that essential parameters must be legislated; the intelligible-principle tradition and India’s own doctrine both permit delegation. But it demonstrates that a system can obtain the flexibility of a market instrument while keeping its defining choices within, or close to, the legislative text, and that doing so simplifies review and strengthens legitimacy. That is a design lesson India can absorb without any doctrinal transplant at all.
Findings and a calibrated standard of review
The analysis supports four findings. First, the section 14(w) delegation is facially valid; the excessive-delegation doctrine, permissive since In re Delhi Laws Act and confirmed through Kunhambu and St. John’s, requires only discernible policy and guidance, which the Amendment’s climate objectives and the residual scheme of the 2001 Act supply.53 Litigation aimed at invalidating the enabling clause is therefore likely to fail and is, in any event, aimed at the wrong target. Second, the operative policy of the regime, the emission-intensity trajectory that determines stringency and distribution, resides not in the statute but in sub-delegated and cross-statute instruments, so that the choice the excessive-delegation doctrine exists to reserve to the legislature has in substance been made by the executive. Third, the grounds for reviewing the resulting rules exist (ultra vires, manifest arbitrariness, proportionality, and procedural fairness) but are calibrated for implementing rules and apply with a deference that is inappropriate to market-constituting instruments. Fourth, the forum for review is fragmented and partly incoherent, because the Energy Conservation Act is absent from Schedule I of the National Green Tribunal Act and the market’s components are dispersed across three parent statutes.
From these findings four proposals follow, ordered from the least to the most institutionally demanding. They are offered as a coherent package rather than as alternatives.
1. A calibrated standard of review. Courts should modulate the intensity of manifest-arbitrariness and proportionality review by the constitutive character of the instrument under challenge. An implementing rule attracts the traditional high threshold and broad deference; a rule that makes the operative policy choice withheld from the legislature (the target, the coverage, the shortfall price) attracts closer scrutiny of its rational basis and of the proportionality of the burdens it allocates. This is not a new ground of review but a principled application of Indian Express Newspapers and Cellular Operators: the deference owed to subordinate legislation flows from the assumption that the legislature made the policy, and that assumption fails where the delegate made it.54
2. Enforceable procedural discipline. The regime’s weakest safeguard is procedural. Courts should recognise, and Parliament should enact, an obligation of meaningful pre-publication consultation and reasoned response for market-constituting rules and target notifications, with a published methodology for target-setting. Procedural review improves the accountability and quality of the delegate’s choice without displacing it, and it is the safeguard most consonant with the separation of powers.
3. Legislative anchoring of the operative variable. The single most effective reform would be to bring the stringency choice closer to Parliament, by stating the emissions trajectory or its governing principles in the Act, or by subjecting target notifications to an affirmative parliamentary resolution rather than the feeble negative laying procedure. The European experience shows this is compatible with a functioning market. Anchoring would also cure the sub-delegation and cross-statute anomalies by relocating the operative choice into the statute that created the market.
4. Forum coherence. Finally, the fragmentation of review should be resolved, most simply by adding the Energy Conservation Act to Schedule I of the National Green Tribunal Act, so that the tribunal with the requisite interdisciplinary expertise can hear disputes arising from the carbon market, while the writ courts retain their inalienable review of vires under L. Chandra Kumar.55 Absent that reform, the specialised forum that exists precisely for environmental adjudication will remain excluded from the most significant environmental regulatory instrument the country has yet produced.
Conclusion
The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022 is a small statute with large consequences. In a handful of clauses it authorised the construction of a national carbon market and then left the construction almost entirely to the executive. Read against India’s excessive-delegation doctrine, that authorisation is valid; the doctrine has asked little of legislatures since 1951, and the Amendment gives more than the little required. But validity at the gateway is not the end of the constitutional inquiry, and treating it as such has diverted attention from the questions that matter. The essential policy of the regime, namely how much the economy must decarbonise, at whose cost, and at what price, has been settled not by Parliament but by a cascade of subordinate instruments, one of them issued under a different statute, insulated by weak parliamentary and procedural controls, and reviewable, if at all, in a fragmented set of fora from which the specialised environmental tribunal is largely absent.
The response this article urges is neither the revival of a rigid nondelegation rule nor resigned deference to “policy.” It is a recalibration of the controls that operate after delegation: a standard of review whose intensity tracks the constitutive character of the instrument, an enforceable duty of consultation and reasons, a legislative anchoring of the stringency choice, and a coherent forum. These reforms preserve the flexibility that a developmental state legitimately needs while restoring the accountability that broad delegation is supposed to be accompanied by. India’s carbon market will shape its industrial economy for a generation. The law that governs it should ensure that its defining choices, wherever they are made, remain answerable: to Parliament where possible, and to a competent and coherent judicial review where not. The excessive-delegation doctrine, by itself, cannot secure that answerability. The task now is to build the downstream controls that can.
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Footnotes
1. The Energy Conservation Act, No. 52 of 2001, India Code (2001).
2. The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, No. 19 of 2022, India Code (2022).
3. Ministry of Power, Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, 2023, S.O. 2825(E), Gazette of India, pt. II, sec. 3(ii) (June 28, 2023) [hereinafter CCTS]; Ministry of Power, Notification S.O. 5369(E), Gazette of India, pt. II, sec. 3(ii) (Dec. 19, 2023) (amending the CCTS and inserting the offset mechanism in para. 11A); Bureau of Energy Efficiency, Detailed Procedure for Compliance Mechanism under the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (July 2024) [hereinafter Detailed Procedure]. On the sequence and content of these instruments, see Detailed Procedures Issued Under the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, AZB & Partners (July 29, 2024), https://www.azbpartners.com/bank/detailed-procedures-issued-under-the-carbon-credit-trading-scheme/.
4. The compliance mechanism is expected to bind some 740 energy-intensive entities across nine sectors once all targets are notified, using fiscal year 2023–24 as the baseline; final targets covering about 490 entities in seven sectors had been notified by January 2026. Int’l Carbon Action P’ship, India Notifies Emission Intensity Targets for Nine Sectors Under Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (Nov. 17, 2025, updated Jan. 16, 2026), https://icapcarbonaction.com/en/news/india-notifies-emission-intensity-targets-nine-sectors-under-carbon-credit-trading-scheme; Int’l Carbon Action P’ship, Indian Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (country profile), https://icapcarbonaction.com/en/ets/indian-carbon-credit-trading-scheme.
5. See Registrar of Coop. Soc’ys v. K. Kunhambu, (1980) 1 SCC 340 (India) (describing the “perennial, nagging problem” of delegated legislation and the practical necessity that drives it); I.P. Massey, Administrative Law (9th ed. 2017).
6. In re Delhi Laws Act, AIR 1951 SC 332 (India). See also Gwalior Rayon Silk Mfg. (Wvg.) Co. v. Assistant Comm’r of Sales Tax, (1974) 4 SCC 98 (India) (essential legislative function is the determination of legislative policy and its formulation as a binding rule of conduct).
7. The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, No. 19 of 2022, India Code (2022), §§ 6(viii), 8 (inserting clause (w), “specify the carbon credit trading scheme,” into section 14 of the 2001 Act, and a new section 14AA on the issue of carbon credit certificates to registered entities that comply with the scheme). The Scheme recites clause (w) of section 14 as its source. See CCTS.
8. Balaram Adhikari, The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022: Key Highlights, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (Jan. 11, 2023), https://conventuslaw.com/report/india-the-energy-conservation-amendment-act-2022-key-highlights/ (summarising the new non-fossil consumption mandate and the corresponding penalty). The mandate is clause (x) of section 14 of the 2001 Act. The amended penalty provision is section 26, as substituted by section 12 of the Amendment Act (failure to comply with directions under clause (x) attracts a penalty under section 26(3)); the factors governing quantum are in section 28.
9. Adhikari, supra note 8 (noting the expansion of the governing council and the addition, in section 28, of “loss caused to a consumer” to the factors relevant to penalty); see The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, No. 19 of 2022, India Code (2022), §§ 3(a), 14.
10. CCTS; see Int’l Carbon Action P’ship, Indian Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, supra note 4 (describing the National Steering Committee for the Indian Carbon Market, the Bureau as administrator, the sectoral technical committees and the registry).
11. Detailed Procedure, supra note 3 (developed under para. 12 of the CCTS); Parveen Arora, Suruchi Kotoky & Ishaan Chopra, Compliance Mechanism Under India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, Mondaq (Sept. 26, 2024), https://www.mondaq.com/india/oil-gas-electricity/1522598/compliance-mechanism-under-indias-carbon-credit-trading-scheme.
12. Ministry of Env’t, Forest & Climate Change, Greenhouse Gases Emission Intensity Target Rules, 2025, G.S.R. 739(E) (Oct. 8, 2025), and Greenhouse Gases Emission Intensity Target (Amendment) Rules, 2025 (Jan. 13, 2026) [together, as amended, hereinafter GEI Target Rules] (both made under the Environment (Protection) Act, No. 29 of 1986, India Code (1986)); see Arora, Kotoky & Chopra, supra note 11 (trajectory developed by the Bureau; targets set by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change); Ayush Shrivastava & Nandika Kaul, India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme: A New Carbon Market Framework, KNM & Partners (Nov. 20, 2025), https://knm.in/blog/indias-carbon-credit-trading-scheme-a-new-carbon-market-framework/ (targets proposed by the National Steering Committee for the Indian Carbon Market and notified by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change).
13. Cent. Elec. Regul. Comm’n, draft regulations on the trading of Carbon Credit Certificates (Nov. 2024); Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (Terms and Conditions for Purchase and Sale of Carbon Credit Certificates) Regulations, 2026, No. RA-14026(13)/1/2024-CERC (Feb. 27, 2026) (made under section 178(1) and (2)(y), read with section 66, of the Electricity Act, No. 36 of 2003, India Code (2003), section 66 being CERC’s market-development mandate; reg. 5 designates the Grid Controller of India as registry); Aditya Pratap Singh, Examining the Regulatory Evolution of India’s Carbon Market and the CERC Carbon Credit Trading Regulations, Neeti Niyaman (2026), https://neetiniyaman.com/?p=2971 (CERC designated regulator for trading in certificates).
14. In re Delhi Laws Act, AIR 1951 SC 332.
15. On the constitutional grounding of the doctrine, see M.P. Jain, Indian Constitutional Law (8th ed. 2018); Gwalior Rayon, (1974) 4 SCC 98 (essential legislative function is the determination of legislative policy and its formulation as a binding rule of conduct).
16. Harishankar Bagla v. State of Madhya Pradesh, AIR 1954 SC 465 (India).
17. Vasantlal Maganbhai Sanjanwala v. State of Bombay, AIR 1961 SC 4 (India).
18. Gwalior Rayon, (1974) 4 SCC 98.
19. Kunhambu, (1980) 1 SCC 340.
20. Id.; see also Kishan Prakash Sharma v. Union of India, (2001) 5 SCC 212 (India) (reaffirming that guidance may be gathered from the scheme and provisions of the statute, including its preamble).
21. St. John’s Teachers Training Inst. v. Reg’l Dir., NCTE, (2003) 3 SCC 321 (India).
22. Hamdard Dawakhana v. Union of India, AIR 1960 SC 554 (India); Harakchand Ratanchand Banthia v. Union of India, AIR 1970 SC 1453 (India) (holding section 5(2)(b) of the Gold (Control) Act, 1968 invalid for excessive delegation). Hamdard Dawakhana is the other principal instance of invalidation for absence of standards.
23. The Bill’s object, as recorded in its Statement of Objects and Reasons, was to facilitate the achievement of the “Panchamrit” presented by India at COP-26 in Glasgow and to introduce carbon trading and mandated non-fossil use “to ensure faster decarbonization of Indian economy” in line with the Paris Agreement. The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill, 2022, Bill No. 177 of 2022, Statement of Objects and Reasons ¶ 3 (India); see also The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill, 2022, PRS Legislative Research (2022).
24. Harishankar Bagla, AIR 1954 SC 465; Kunhambu, (1980) 1 SCC 340.
25. On the intensity-based baseline-and-credit design, and the shortfall obligation to purchase certificates or pay environmental compensation of twice the average certificate price, see GEI Target Rules; Sandra Menon, Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS) 2023: Assessing India’s First Mandatory Carbon Market and Its Path to Net-Zero, IMPRI Impact & Policy Rsch. Inst. (July 28, 2026), https://www.impriindia.com/?p=73679; Int’l Carbon Action P’ship, India Notifies Emission Intensity Targets for Nine Sectors, supra note 4.
26. Agric. Mkt. Comm. v. Shalimar Chem. Works Ltd., (1997) 5 SCC 516 (India) (holding Rule 74(2) of the Andhra Pradesh (Agricultural Produce and Livestock) Market Rules, 1969 ultra vires, because “[s]uch legal fiction could be created only by the Legislature and not by a delegate in exercise of the rule making power”).
27. Sahni Silk Mills (P) Ltd. v. ESI Corp., (1994) 5 SCC 346 (India) (adopting the statement that there is “a strong presumption against construing a grant of legislative, judicial, or disciplinary power as impliedly authorising sub-delegation”). See also Barium Chems. Ltd. v. Co. Law Bd., AIR 1967 SC 295 (India) (the maxim is merely a rule of construction, and sub-delegation can be sustained if permitted by express provision or by necessary implication).
28. Sahni Silk Mills, (1994) 5 SCC 346.
29. On the ineffectiveness of laying as a control in India, see Jain, supra note 15; Massey, supra note 5.
30. The Scheme was “officially notified” following stakeholder consultation, but that consultation was not compelled by the parent Act, which requires only that the Central Government act in consultation with the Bureau. See Int’l Carbon Action P’ship, Indian Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, supra note 4; The Energy Conservation Act, No. 52 of 2001, India Code (2001), § 14.
31. Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) (P) Ltd. v. Union of India, (1985) 1 SCC 641 (India).
32. Agric. Mkt. Comm., (1997) 5 SCC 516.
33. Khoday Distilleries Ltd. v. State of Karnataka, (1996) 10 SCC 304 (India).
34. Cellular Operators Ass’n of India v. TRAI, (2016) 7 SCC 703 (India).
35. Shayara Bano v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1 (India).
36. Khoday Distilleries, (1996) 10 SCC 304; cf. Cellular Operators, (2016) 7 SCC 703 (adopting the Khoday formulation that delegated legislation can be struck down only if it is manifestly arbitrary, “a law which could not be reasonably expected to emanate from an authority delegated with the law-making power”).
37. Indian Express Newspapers, (1985) 1 SCC 641.
38. Om Kumar v. Union of India, (2001) 2 SCC 386 (India).
39. Modern Dental Coll. & Rsch. Ctr. v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (2016) 7 SCC 353 (India); K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1 (India); Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637 (India). On the test’s uneven application in India, see Aparna Chandra, Proportionality in India: A Bridge to Nowhere?, 3 U. Oxford Hum. Rts. Hub J. 55 (2020).
40. Cellular Operators, (2016) 7 SCC 703.
41. Cellular Operators, (2016) 7 SCC 703 (commending a transparent process in which subordinate legislation is made after consultation with stakeholders, together with an explanatory memorandum giving reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with their submissions); cf. Indian Express Newspapers, (1985) 1 SCC 641 (reasonableness of subordinate legislation is justiciable).
42. The National Green Tribunal Act, No. 19 of 2010, India Code (2010). On the Tribunal’s composition and purpose, see Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 647 (India) (recognising the need for specialised environmental adjudication).
43. The National Green Tribunal Act, No. 19 of 2010, India Code (2010), § 14, sched. I. The seven scheduled enactments are exhaustively listed; the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and several other environmental statutes are conspicuously absent. The Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 has since been renamed the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, 1980.
44. Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Bd. v. Sterlite Indus. (I) Ltd., (2019) 19 SCC 479 (India) (“the Tribunal exercising appellate jurisdiction cannot strike down rules or regulations made under this Act. Therefore, it would be fallacious to state that the Tribunal has powers of judicial review akin to that of a High Court exercising constitutional powers under Article 226”).
45. Mun. Corp. of Greater Mumbai v. Ankita Sinha, (2022) 13 SCC 401 (India). The Court in Ankita Sinha reconciled a broad suo motu jurisdiction with Sterlite by tying the Tribunal’s competence to its statutory subject matter while rejecting a narrow, purely adversarial reading of its role.
46. L. Chandra Kumar v. Union of India, (1997) 3 SCC 261 (India).
47. PTC India Ltd. v. Cent. Elec. Regul. Comm’n, (2010) 4 SCC 603 (India) (the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity has no jurisdiction to decide the validity of regulations framed under section 178 of the Electricity Act, 2003, whose validity may be challenged by judicial review under Article 226); see The Electricity Act, No. 36 of 2003, India Code (2003), §§ 111, 125.
48. Gundy v. United States, 588 U.S. 128 (2019).
49. West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697 (2022).
50. Directive 2003/87/EC, of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 October 2003 Establishing a Scheme for Greenhouse Gas Emission Allowance Trading Within the Community and Amending Council Directive 96/61/EC, 2003 O.J. (L 275) 32 (EC).
51. Case C-127/07, Arcelor Atlantique et Lorraine v. Premier ministre, 2008 E.C.R. I-9895.
52. See, e.g., Case C-5/16, Poland v. Parliament & Council, ECLI:EU:C:2018:483 (challenge to a market-stability-reserve decision on legal-basis and proportionality grounds).
53. In re Delhi Laws Act, AIR 1951 SC 332; Kunhambu, (1980) 1 SCC 340; St. John’s Teachers Training Inst., (2003) 3 SCC 321.
54. Indian Express Newspapers, (1985) 1 SCC 641; Cellular Operators, (2016) 7 SCC 703.
55. L. Chandra Kumar, (1997) 3 SCC 261.