2

Jan

Redefining the Aravallis: When Law Dilutes Ecology and Endangers Human Survival

image

Dr. M. Iqbal Siddiqui

A person with a white beard and a black hat AI-generated content may be incorrect.

New Delhi | Friday | 2 January 2026

The Aravalli hills do not dominate the skyline. Worn down by geological time, they rise quietly across nearly 670 kilometres—from Gujarat through Rajasthan and Haryana to the outskirts of Delhi. Yet this understated mountain system, among the oldest on Earth and formed over 1.5 billion years ago, performs functions far more consequential than its modest elevation suggests. The Aravallis regulate climate, recharge groundwater, trap dust, anchor biodiversity, and serve as a living geological archive for north-western India.

On 20 November 2025, a Supreme Court ruling fundamentally altered how this ancient range is understood in law. Acting on recommendations of a committee constituted by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), the Court accepted a uniform, elevation-based definition of the Aravallis. Under this framework, only landforms rising at least 100 metres above surrounding terrain qualify as Aravalli hills, and two or more such hills within 500 metres constitute a range. The Court also directed scientific mapping and preparation of a Management Plan for Sustainable Mining before new leases could be considered.

Presented as an effort to standardise definitions and curb illegal mining, the ruling has instead triggered deep concern among scientists, environmentalists, and public-health experts. The anxiety stems not from what the judgment restricts, but from what it quietly permits.

Article at a Glance
The Aravalli hills, one of the world’s oldest mountain systems, play a vital ecological role in regulating climate, recharging groundwater, controlling desertification, filtering dust, and sustaining biodiversity across north-western India. A Supreme Court ruling in November 2025 redefined the Aravallis using a uniform elevation-based criterion, recognising only hills rising at least 100 metres above surrounding terrain.
While intended to standardise definitions and curb illegal mining, the judgment has raised serious concern among scientists and environmentalists. By excluding over 90 per cent of the historically recognised Aravalli landscape, the ruling weakens ecological protection and legally permits expanded mining. This threatens air quality, public health, water security, and biodiversity, particularly in Rajasthan, Haryana, and Delhi-NCR.
The article argues that reducing a complex ecological system to a bureaucratic measurement risks long-term environmental and human costs, undermining the Aravallis’ role as essential infrastructure for survival.

When a Mountain Becomes a Measurement

Mountains are not defined by height alone. In geology and ecology, they are understood through structure, continuity, slope, hydrology, soil stability, vegetation, and ecological function. The Aravallis, heavily eroded over geological time, no longer rise dramatically—but erosion does not erase identity. If anything, it heightens vulnerability.

By reducing the Aravallis to a local-relief threshold, the law transforms a continuous ecological system into a bureaucratic abstraction. Lower ridges, plateau edges, slopes, scrublands, and rocky outcrops—long recognised by scientists as integral to the Aravalli system—are rendered legally peripheral.

Forest Survey of India data illustrates the scale of exclusion. Of more than 12,000 hills mapped in Rajasthan, barely 1,048 meet the 100-metre criterion. In effect, over 90 per cent of the landscape historically understood as Aravalli terrain risks losing legal recognition and protection. What survives on paper is a skeletal remnant of a once-continuous ecosystem. This is not ecological clarification; it is ecological contraction by definition.

A Fragile Shield Against Desertification

The most critical function of the Aravallis is also the least visible. The range forms a natural climatic barrier between the Thar Desert and the fertile Indo-Gangetic plains. For centuries, its ridges—high and low—have slowed desert expansion by anchoring soil, moderating winds, retaining moisture, and sustaining vegetation.

Scientific assessments have long warned that fragmentation of this barrier could allow desertification to creep eastwards, threatening Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, and even Delhi. Lower hills and gentle slopes, though unimpressive in height, act as windbreaks and dust traps. Excising them from protection weakens the entire system.

A Supreme Court–appointed committee noted in 2018 that decades of illegal quarrying had already erased 31 of 128 identified Aravalli hills, creating gaps that funnel dust into the plains. The new definition risks widening these gaps—not through illegality, but through legal permissibility.

Air Pollution and Public Health: An Invisible Link

Delhi-NCR’s air crisis is usually framed around vehicles, industry, and crop burning. Far less attention is paid to the geomorphological defences that once mitigated dust and particulate matter. Through forest cover and rugged terrain, the Aravallis historically absorbed and deflected airborne dust.

Mining and stone-crushing reverse this function. As lower ridges lose protection, PM2.5 and PM10 levels rise, dust storms intensify, and pollution travels far beyond extraction sites. In mining belts of Rajasthan and Haryana, this has already translated into higher incidence of asthma, chronic respiratory disease, cardiovascular illness, and occupational health disorders.

What appears as an environmental issue thus becomes a public-health crisis, disproportionately affecting children, the elderly, and low-income communities—those least responsible for ecological degradation and least equipped to escape its consequences.

Water Security: The Crisis Below Ground

The most far-reaching impact of redefining the Aravallis lies underground. The range is among north-western India’s most important groundwater recharge systems. Rainwater intercepted by hills—especially fractured rocks, slopes, and shallow valleys—feeds aquifers that sustain agriculture and cities across Rajasthan, Haryana, and Delhi-NCR.

When these areas are mined or built over, recharge collapses. Aquifers fracture, drainage channels vanish, and traditional water sources—wells, johads, baoris—dry up. In already water-stressed regions, this accelerates agricultural decline, erodes livelihoods, and fuels distress migration.

The irony is stark: cities dependent on construction material extracted from the Aravallis will face deeper water scarcity as a direct ecological consequence of that extraction.

Biodiversity Loss Without Spectacle

The Aravallis are often mischaracterised as barren. In reality, they host dry deciduous forests, scrublands, grasslands, and seasonal wetlands supporting diverse life. Even low-elevation ridges function as wildlife corridors, enabling genetic flow between fragmented habitats.

Removing legal protection fragments ecosystems further. Mining causes not only immediate habitat destruction but permanent loss of regenerative capacity. Once topsoil is removed and rock strata blasted, recovery becomes improbable—even with restoration efforts. This is biodiversity loss without spectacle: slow, silent, and irreversible.

Development, Law, and Structural Imbalance

Proponents of extraction cite revenue and employment. Yet these gains are short-lived and localised, while costs—pollution, water depletion, health crises—are long-term and widely dispersed. This is not conspiracy but structural imbalance: narrow economic benefits accrue to extractive interests, while environmental and human costs are socialised across regions and generations.

Official affidavits increasingly foreground “strategic and critical minerals”—lithium, graphite, tungsten, rare earths—framing extraction as essential to energy transition and national security. Conservation thus becomes conditional. Nature is no longer a life-support system, but a resource reserve awaiting clearance.

An Intergenerational Imperative

The Aravallis are not obstacles to development; they are infrastructure of survival. Their quiet endurance secures water, stabilises climate, protects air quality, and sustains ecological balance across north India. Their destruction cannot be undone once extraction takes its toll.

In redrawing the Aravallis on paper, we risk erasing them from the land—and with them, the ecological security of millions. The time for reductive definitions has passed. What remains is the responsibility to protect, restore, and preserve an ancient range whose survival is inseparable from our own.

**************

  • Share:

About Us

We must explain to you how all seds this mistakens idea off denouncing pleasures and praising pain was born and I will give you a completed accounts..

Contact Us

Contact Info

  • 70, Gyan Khand- 4, Indirapuram, Ghaziabad. Uttar Pradesh.
  • +91-9810533682
  • info@mediamap.co.in
  • Week Days: 09.00 to 18.00 Sunday: Closed