The mountains, for now, survive on a stay order and a committee’s promise; the corporate ledger survives on something thinner still. When a company that has mined a hillside into ruin finally collapses under its debts, it enters what the law calls the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code ~ the mechanism by which a distressed firm is handed to a committee of its creditors, restructured or sold, and returned to the market cleansed of what it owed.

This is the one occasion on which the law has the standing to reprice a company’s whole conduct, to ask not merely what it owes the banks but what it owes the land. The law does not ask. It enters through a single door marked financial default, and it leaves through the same one. Look closely at the architecture and the omission is deliberate, not accidental. The order in which claims are paid out of a failed company’s estate is fixed by statute, and environmental harm appears nowhere in that queue; the clean-slate principle that lets a buyer take over the business free of its past liabilities makes no exception for a poisoned aquifer or an unreclaimed pit.

The insolvency regulator has issued no instrument requiring a resolution plan to measure, price or repair ecological damage. A resolution plan may therefore satisfy every financial creditor to the last rupee and carry not one binding environmental obligation; the firm emerges solvent and the slope stays broken. Financial death and rebirth have been engineered with great care. Ecological debt simply evaporates. The landscape has no seat in the committee of creditors. And when harm is not translated into enforceable liability it does not disappear ~ it is merely transferred.

Creditors take haircuts; communities take dust. What the country needs is not another disclosure rule but the enforcement organ it never built, and its shape is not hard to draw. Lodge a dedicated........

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