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The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) invites you to a talk on:
Courts as Environmental Watchdogs: Big Data and AI Analysis of Four Decades of Indian Litigation
Thursday, 24th July 2025, 3:30 PM IST
Speaker:
Dr. Shareen Joshi, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University & Senior Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science
Moderator:
Dr. Namita Wahi, Senior Fellow, CPR & Founding Director, Land Rights Initiative
This event will be held in a hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online over Zoom. Please register to attend.
About the talk:
This talk examines whether judicial enforcement can effectively address environmental degradation in India through a comprehensive analysis spanning four decades. The speaker will build on a study that that she was a part of to construct a unique dataset combining environmental court cases, water pollution measurements, corporate financial records, and infant mortality statistics, exploiting quasi-random assignment of cases to judges to isolate causal effects of judicial intervention. The study conceptualises environmental litigation as “scrutiny” — temporary monitoring that creates accountability pressure during proceedings.
The findings of this study revealed a sobering picture: while litigation generates measurable reductions in water pollution and negatively affects defendant firms’ financial performance during active cases, these improvements prove ephemeral. Pollution levels systematically rebound once cases conclude, with no detectable impact on infant mortality at any point. Courts function primarily as temporary monitors rather than agents of lasting change. To expand their analysis, the team developed a novel methodological approach using large language models to identify and classify environmental cases from thousands of additional judicial decisions, enabling large-scale legal data analysis that would be prohibitively expensive manually. These findings demonstrate the limited efficacy of judicial interventions in highly polluted developing contexts, but also showcase how AI tools can advance computational legal research.
About the speaker:
Dr. Shareen Joshi is an Associate Professor of International Development at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University and a BA in Mathematics-Economics from Reed College.
Dr. Joshi’s research focuses on inequality, human capital investment, and grassroots collective action in South Asia. Her work has been published across Development Economics, Population Studies, Environmental Studies, and Gender Studies. Dr. Joshi has served as a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, the Hewlett Foundation, the Government of India, the Government of Rajasthan, and several non-profit organisations.
