On June 16, 2025, India designated Chhari Dhand, a seasonal wetland in Gujarat’s Kachchh district, a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention (Site No. 2588, 22,700 hectares). Its Ramsar Information Sheet recorded an average annual waterbird count of 1,11,449 individuals between 2017 and 2024, including 30,000 Common Cranes, 10,000 Great White Pelicans, 20,000 Lesser Flamingos, and 32,000 Greater Flamingos. The same sheet listed renewable energy as an actual high-impact threat in the surrounding area.Eight months after that designation, NTPC Renewable Energy Limited’s foundation-drilling machines are on the ground nearby, testing soil bearing capacity for a proposed solar park covering approximately 4,500 acres across 16 Banni villages, around 1,400 acres of them in the eco-sensitive zone adjacent to the Chhari Dhand Conservation Reserve and Kiro Hill.No environmental impact assessment has been conducted. None is required. The more important question is not simply why, but whether any other legal mechanism performs the function that an EIA would have served.When EIAs stop, what takes their place?In August 2017, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change issued an office memorandum confirming that the EIA’s 2006 notification does not apply to solar photovoltaic projects, solar thermal projects or solar parks. While the ministry initially exempted individual solar projects from the EIA framework in 2011, the August 2017 office memorandum explicitly extended this exemption to include expansive solar parks.The schedule to the 2006 EIA notification identifies the categories of projects that require prior environmental clearance. Conventional power projects are included: Coal and gas-fired plants above 500 megawatt (MW) require clearance from the Union government, while those between 5 and 500 MW require clearance at the state level. Solar photovoltaic and solar thermal projects, however, do not appear anywhere in the schedule.The schedule removes the one statutory mechanism that would have required baseline ecological data, public consultation and cumulative impact assessment before a project of this scale proceeds.Other legal frameworks remain available in theory. The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, covers protected areas but the Chhari Dhand Conservation Reserve’s protections apply within its gazetted boundary, not to the Banni commons surrounding it. Forest clearance is required if forest land is diverted, but grasslands are not forests in Indian law, and Banni has no protected forest notification.Stoliczka’s bush chat, part of a vulnerable population, photographed December 9, 2016, in Banni grasslands, Kutch, Gujarat. Credit: UdayKiran28, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsCoastal Regulation Zone rules do not apply this far inland. State pollution control consents attach to operational discharge, not to land acquisition or site preparation. None of these mechanisms requires an assessment of ecological impacts before the project begins, and none gives affected communities a formal right to participate in the decision.EIA, whatever its documented failures in practice, requires those things as a matter of statute. Its absence from solar projects is not a gap in one legal instrument. It is a gap in the architecture.The architecture point has a sharper edge. The EIA notification’s schedule contains a “general” condition that any listed project proposed within 10 km of a protected area under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, is escalated from state-level to Union-level scrutiny. The Chhari Dhand Conservation Reserve is a protected area under that Act. Had the NTPC project been a thermal plant, highway, port, or any other listed project, its location near the reserve would have automatically triggered Union-level review.The significance of the solar exemption is therefore not simply that it dispenses with environmental clearance. It also excludes the project from the proximity-based safeguard that the EIA framework applies to other major infrastructure projects in the same location.A principle without a processThe 2017 office memorandum is not a blanket exemption. By explicitly binding its approvals to the compliance criteria of an underlying June 2011 directive, the ministry effectively attached a siting condition directly relevant to this project: solar developments are mandated to avoid “any wet land, any agriculture land, ecologically sensitive areas, [and] areas rich in bio-diversity.” The condition carries no independent enforcement mechanism and creates no cause of action in court. Its significance lies elsewhere. It records the ministry’s own assessment that certain landscapes warrant greater caution when renewable energy projects are sited within them.Chhari Dhand was designated a Ramsar wetland on June 16, 2025. The proposed NTPC project borders its conservation reserve. The ministry that wrote the exemption also wrote the condition against wetland siting. The available public record does not indicate whether the siting considerations identified in the 2017 office memorandum were evaluated in relation to the project.This is not an allegation of legal non-compliance. The 2017 condition does not itself create enforceable rights. Rather, it highlights a regulatory inconsistency: a project has progressed without the kind of ecological scrutiny that the ministry itself recognised as appropriate for wetlands and biodiversity-rich areas.The wasteland classificationThe Banni grasslands cover approximately 2,600 square kilometres in Kachchh. The Maldhari communities who graze buffalo and sheep across these commons have no formal land title to the areas they use. In Gujarat’s revenue records, the land belongs to the state, classified as waste. That classification is legally operative. The state can allot revenue wasteland for development purposes with fewer procedural hurdles than agricultural or forest land.The classification was not designed to describe ecological productivity; it was designed to track uncultivated land for colonial-era revenue purposes. The problem is not that the classification is wrong as a matter of law – it may be entirely regular – but that it is being used for a purpose it was never designed to serve: deciding where large renewable energy infrastructure should go.The Ministry of Environment and Forest’s own siting condition provides the link. It instructed that solar projects should avoid wetlands and biodiversity-rich areas. The question that condition raises, and the process that should answer it, is whether the Banni commons adjacent to a Ramsar-designated wetland qualify. No process has raised that question. The wasteland classification makes the commons administratively available; the EIA exemption removes the mechanism that would have asked whether they are ecologically suitable. Together, they produce a project in an internationally recognised wetland landscape that has never been required to justify its location.Maldhari (pastoralist) with cattle, Kutch, Gujarat, photographed October 19, 2022. Credit: Drashokk, CC BY-SA 4, via Wikimedia CommonsThe Maldhari families in the 16 affected villages have not been formally consulted. This matters beyond fairness: the right to livelihood, read into Article 21 of the constitution through decades of environmental jurisprudence, has been held to require that communities dependent on natural resources be heard before those resources are diverted. The legal basis for that claim remains contested in its application to common grazing land, but it points to a gap in the project’s approval process that has not been addressed.The siting questionThe strongest objection to this analysis is not that Banni lacks ecological value. It is that India must build solar infrastructure somewhere, that climate change imposes its own ecological costs, and that environmental law must develop principles for allocating those costs rather than simply multiplying procedural hurdles.That objection is correct, and this piece does not argue against the NTPC project proceeding. What it argues is that the allocation of ecological costs requires a process capable of making the trade-off consciously, based on baseline data, impact assessment, community participation, consideration of alternative sites. The 2017 office memorandum acknowledged this: it tried to build a siting principle into the exemption.The problem is that the principle has no procedure attached to it. A siting preference without an assessment process is not an allocation mechanism. It is a statement of good intentions with no institutional machinery behind it.When parliament asked in 2022 whether the government had studied the ecological footprint of large solar plants in Open Natural Ecosystems, the ministry’s answer confirmed that solar projects can be installed in such ecosystems based on ‘techno-commercial feasibility and site requirements’, with no ecological assessment required before that determination is made.Judicial oversight and regulatory gapsThe Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India is often cited as evidence that the court has endorsed solar development even at ecological cost. That reading overstates it. The court declined a blanket prohibition on solar transmission lines across Rajasthan and Gujarat’s grassland habitats, but it established a committee with monitoring functions and required compensatory conservation measures.In environmental litigation, Indian courts have often retained supervisory jurisdiction through committees and periodic reporting mechanisms when existing regulatory institutions are unable to effectively monitor ecological impacts. The monitoring committee in Ranjitsinh was not routine case management. It filled a specific gap: no statutory body was mandated to assess and manage the ecological impacts of solar transmission infrastructure on grassland bird populations.A court acting as the primary mechanism for ecological oversight in an infrastructure sector this large is not a solution. It is the system telling you something went wrong upstream.Closing the accountability gapThe governance gap here has two components. First, the EIA gap for solar projects needs a carve-out: projects above a threshold scale, or proposed within a defined distance of Ramsar sites, conservation reserves or documented pastoral commons should require an ecological assessment before site preparation begins. EIA is the right instrument not as the only option but as the existing statutory mechanism that mandates public consultation, baseline data and cumulative impact assessment, none of which any alternative mechanism currently requires for solar projects on common land.Second, the Ministry of Environment and Forest’s 2017 siting condition needs an enforcement mechanism. At present it records a principle and does nothing to implement it. A mandatory pre-allotment screening mechanism, even one substantially lighter than a full EIA, could assess proposed solar sites against ecological databases, Ramsar boundaries and land-use records before development begins. That would close the present accountability gap without creating a significant obstacle to renewable energy deployment.India’s wasteland classifications are widely acknowledged to be based on 1980s satellite data. Updating them as a precondition for solar allotment is a tractable administrative reform, not a structural obstacle to the energy transition.The issue is not whether the project should proceed, but whether the current regulatory framework contains an adequate process for evaluating its location. The ministry’s siting guidance recognises wetlands and biodiversity-rich areas as sensitive locations, yet provides no corresponding mechanism for determining when those concerns are triggered. In the absence of such a process, significant siting decisions may be made without a structured assessment of the ecological considerations the guidance itself identifies as relevant.Apeksha Kachhawaha is a graduate from Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur. Kshitij Saruparia is a graduate from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.