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M/S Sanvira Industries vs Rain CII Carbon (Vizag) Ltd. & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2023 INSC 586Decided 3 Jul 2023
Civil Appeal Nos. 3834-3838 of 2023
S. Ravindra Bhat · Dipankar Datta · Aravind Kumar

Background

Following Supreme Court orders in the long-running M.C. Mehta environmental litigation, the government capped the import of raw pet-coke (RPC), a highly polluting fuel, at 1.4 million tonnes per annum, to be allocated among six "calciner" companies based on their production capacity as of 9 October 2018. Sanvira Industries, whose Consent-to-Operate (CTO) at that time showed a capacity of only 2,00,000 tonnes, repeatedly but unsuccessfully sought a larger allocation by claiming its true capacity was already 3,30,000 tonnes by that date. Years later, it obtained a fresh certificate from the Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board (APPCB) supporting the higher figure, and a government committee then revised its allocation upward: a change Rain CII Carbon, a competing calciner, challenged in the Delhi High Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court upheld the Delhi High Court's Division Bench ruling that had struck down the enhanced allocation. It held that the only capacity figure that legally mattered was what Sanvira's official Consent-to-Operate (CTO) showed as of 9 October 2018-2,00,000 tonnes, since that CTO document, not any later "clarification," was the basis on which the Court itself had fixed the 1.4-million-tonne cap. The CTO for the higher capacity was granted only in December 2019, over a year later, and Sanvira's repeated attempts to get its capacity backdated had already been rejected by the Supreme Court and the government committee on multiple prior occasions. Allowing a belated certificate to override the settled CTO-based allocation would undermine the integrity of the entire environmentally-driven quota scheme, so the appeals were dismissed.

Lesson Learnt

In regulatory allocation schemes tied to a specific cut-off date, only the official record that existed as of that date controls: a company cannot retroactively upgrade its entitlement years later through a fresh certificate, especially after its claims to that effect have already been rejected multiple times.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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