He has been burnt in effigy in Agra, people have threatened to "bash him up" others have offered him bribes to drop a case. Meet Mahesh Chander Mehta, India's one-man environment protection force.
Mahesh Chander Mehta remains undaunted. Best known for the Supreme Court decision which closed smoke-belching foundries in the vicinity of the Taj Mahal, Mehta's efforts have led to new policies and guidelines in India and expanded the scope of existing law to bring environmental protection within the constitutional framework. Winner of a slew of international awards, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service (1997), the activist has a far more creditable distinction which makes his colleagues go green with envy: the 52-year-old Delhi-based lawyer has never lost a case.
For someone who is perhaps the most famous environmental lawyer in India, it is ironic that Mehta did not set out to be either an environmentalist or a lawyer. Born one of eight children to a farming family in Jammu in northern India, Mehta had fairly conventional aspirations — he wanted to be a doctor. It was only after he failed to get into medical college that he studied law and political science. After practising at the Jammu High Court for 10 years, Mehta shifted to Delhi and the Indian Supreme Court in the early 1980s.
A remark at a party in 1983 that lawyers were too greedy a bunch to be interested in public causes like saving the Taj Mahal pushed Mehta towards environmental activism. He dug up press clippings, read books, and visited the Taj to see first hand what was happening to Shah Jahan's 400-year-old monument to love. The trip convinced him that Agra's air pollution was affecting the Taj's marble.