Counting water bodies on paper is no longer enough: to demarcate water bodies on the ground, the Supreme Court has told every State and Wetland Authority to verify them physically, with four weeks to report and four months to finish, and has tied their protection to the right to life.
New Delhi: Observing that water bodies are a vital source of drinking water and so fall within the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has directed States and State Wetland Authorities to physically ground-truth and demarcate wetlands and other water bodies, following the methodology Tamil Nadu has used [Anand Arya v. Union of India and Others].
A Bench of Justice Aravind Kumar and Justice Vipul M. Pancholi passed the order of October 12, 2026 in Writ Petition (Civil) No. 304 of 2018, which was heard together with W.P.(C) No. 230 of 2001 and W.P.(C) No. 302 of 2020.
Four weeks, then four months
Within four weeks, States must file compliance affidavits that describe their methods and the status of the exercise, including what has been done for water bodies other than wetlands. To finish the work, the Court gave four months. It turned down a request for six to nine months.
The Court indicated that the exercise should take in the water bodies identified in the existing atlases, including those smaller than 2.25 hectares, and not merely designated wetlands. Satellite verification, reconciliation of revenue records and physical pillars, for legal and cadastral accuracy, are to be part of it.
Tamil Nadu as the yardstick
The Bench noted that the compliance affidavits before it were silent on whether Rule 7(1)(a) had been followed, as the Court had earlier required. Tamil Nadu’s process, in its view, appeared systematic and scientific. The order sets out that State’s steps and directs every State and Wetland Authority that has not already done so to ground-truth along the same lines.
In plain terms, ground-truthing means going to a water body and checking its location, boundaries, size and condition against official records and satellite images.
Nine years on, the rule is still unfinished
Under Rule 7(1)(a) of the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017, State and Union Territory authorities are to prepare brief documents on every wetland. The Court has noted that, some nine years after the Rules were published, that work is incomplete. The petitioner, birder and environmentalist Anand Arya, complains that States and Union Territories have not completed demarcation. The Court has passed a run of orders on the subject, among them those of December 11, 2024, August 19, 2025, October 7, 2025, October 28, 2025 and July 28, 2026.
Back in August 2025, a Bench of Justice Aravind Kumar and Justice N.V. Anjaria had fixed an outer limit of two months for ground-truthing and boundary demarcation, cautioned that State environment secretaries could be called to appear in person, and asked States to explain how they were protecting wetlands below 2.25 hectares, which the Wetland Atlas puts at around 5,55,557.
What Karnataka reported
Karnataka told the Court that it has 14,936 wetlands in all, going by Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change data, and that 14,355 of them have been ground-truthed and demarcated. The State must file, within four weeks, the documents showing how that ground-truthing and boundary demarcation were done.
Vrindavan’s kunds: no valuer yet
The Court rejected an application for a valuer to work out what it would cost to restore the temple tanks, or kunds, of Vrindavan, about 80 percent of which, the applicant said, are in a dilapidated state. A valuer was not called for at this stage, it said, because on July 28, 2026 it had turned down a related Rs 80 crore restoration request and was waiting for State reports before giving further directions.
The matters will next be heard on November 16, 2026.
From a wetlands exercise to a water-body one
By describing water bodies as sources of drinking water, the Court has put a constitutional duty behind what had been a paperwork requirement under rules, left incomplete for nearly a decade. The exercise is no longer about wetlands alone.
For the States, the order brings a fixed timetable, affidavits in four weeks and field verification in four months, judged against one State’s model. They will have to show how each water body was located, measured and marked, and not only how many were counted.
Case Title: Anand Arya v. Union of India and Others [W.P.(C) No. 304 of 2018, with W.P.(C) No. 230 of 2001 and W.P.(C) No. 302 of 2020]
Bench: Justice Aravind Kumar and Justice Vipul M. Pancholi
Date of Order: October 12, 2026