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"The Active Flood plain areas in NCT covers an area of 97 sq. km. The area lies between 23°28‟20" N and 28°51‟30", and 77°07‟E and 77°20‟37"E and falls in the Survey of India Toposheets No. 53H."

18. The petitioners further submit that the river Yamuna has been damaged, polluted and silted up in such a manner that the NEERI Report of 2005 gave a finding to the effect that the stretch/river has lost its carrying capacity. This has happened because of various authorities not taking care of the nature's bounty and not applying the precautionary principle. This riverbed and the entire ecosystem cannot be allowed to get further exhausted. At present what is required is not application of precautionary principle but infact sincere efforts to rejuvenate the river as an obligation under the Constitution of India and the Doctrine of Public Trust.

43. The Apex Court in A.P. Pollution Control Board v. Prof. M.V. Nayadu (Retd.) & Others (1999) 2 SCC 718 discussed the development of the precautionary principle in the following words:

32. A basic shift in the approach to environmental protection occurred initially between 1972 and 1982. Earlier the concept was based on the 'assimilative capacity rule as revealed from Principle 6 of the Stockholm Declaration of the U.N. Conference on Human Environment, 1972. The said principle assumed that science could provide policy-makers with the information and means necessary to avoid encroaching upon the capacity of the environment to assimilate impacts and it presumed that relevant technical expertise would be available when environmental harm was predicted and there would be sufficient time to act in order to avoid such harm. But in the 11th principle of the U.N. General Assembly Resolution on World Charter for Nature, 1982, the emphasis shifted to the 'precautionary Principle', and this was reiterated in the Rio Conference of 1992 in its Principle 15 which reads as follows:

Precautionary duties must not only be triggered by the suspicion of concrete danger but also by (Justified) concern or risk potential. The precautionary principle was recommended by the UNEP Governing Council (1989). The Bomako Convention also lowered the threshold at which scientific evidence might require action by not referring to "serious" or "irreversible" as adjectives qualifying harm. However, summing up the legal status of the precautionary principle, one commentator characterised the principle as still "evolving" for though it is accepted as part of the international customary law, "the consequences of its application in any potential situation will be influenced by the circumstances of each case". (See First Report of Dr. Sreenivasa Rao Pemmaraju, Special - Rapporteur, International Law Commission dated 3.4.1998 paras 61 to 72).

76. At the same time, such economic growth inevitably affects the natural resources and environment. The challenge, therefore, is to ensure that the economic growth does not supersede the concern for environmental protection and the natural resources are conserved as far as possible. In order to achieve this Sustainable Development, the principles which have been developed are: (a) the Precautionary Principle; (b) the Polluter Pays principle; (c) the Public Trust doctrine;