The emerging contours of this realization are becoming apparent in developments, which have taken place mostly in this and the last decade such as rivers in Ecuador and New Zealand having won legal rights. In November 2016, a constitutional court of Colombia bestowed rights of “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration” to the Atrarto river basin. Nearer home, in 2017, the Uttarakhand High Court conferred legal entity hood to the Indian rivers Ganga, the Yamuna as well as their source glaciers, Gangotri and Yamunotri with corresponding rights, duties and liabilities (a move which has since been stayed by the Supreme Court on technicalities). Considered judgements by the courts of the land are like shots in the arm to peoples’ movements who have been advocating the urgent need for action to protect and revive rivers for decades. Judicial activism is forcing the legislative arm to revisit its approach to nature predicating a wiser course of action to restore rivers to better health. The fundamental challenge here is to reconcile the inherent contradiction between the current development paradigm, which is solely exploitative in approach with the recognized rights of nature. We can no longer afford to take the business-as-usual tack wherein environmental laws and constitutional provisions related to it are promptly sacrificed at the altar of growth-centred development at the first hint of a contradiction. As Ashish Kothari et al. in their “Rivers and Human Rights: We are the River, the River is Us?” have argued that we have to go beyond a legal rights-based approach. For the rights of rivers (and more generally of nature) to be safeguarded, we need major transformations in the consciousness, values, and actions of people living along or using them. This kind of eco-centric thought process is not new to humankind. Indigenous people around the world have respected the rest of nature as a part of their world views, as a part of living.