By Amit Kapoor and Sheen Zutshi
A Mountain Range on Trial: The Aravalllis Story We’re Erasing
The Aravalli range, among the oldest surviving landforms on this planet, meanders through Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat. What is visible today is merely the weathered skeleton of a vast Proterozoic mountain system that emerged nearly 1.8 billion years ago. Over millennia, the range has been sculpted by natural forces; in recent decades, far more brutally, by human intervention. Mining, deforestation and unplanned development have stripped the hills of their ecological resilience and fragmented what was once an expansive, interconnected landscape. The remnants now stand as the last living vestiges of a unique natural heritage. It is now shrunken, degraded and perilously close to disappearance. Strikingly, close to 90% of the hill terrain is no longer officially recognised as part of the Aravallis, leaving a fragile ecosystem exposed to accelerated loss and erasure.
This fear is grounded in the new scientific uniform definition of the Aravalli ecosystem, recognized by the Supreme Court, which redefines the Aravalli as any landform with an elevation of at least 100 metres above local relief. This redefinition, being proposed as a measure of standardisation, risks undermining India’s oldest geological heritage and one of its last ecological safeguards. There are arguments in favour of the standardisation of definitions of what constitutes the Aravalli, but nature has no advocate of its own. Aravallis cannot plead its own case; this is why we must.
The Aravalli landscape has drawn the Supreme Court’s attention multiple times, as illegal mining across its four states has forced repeated judicial intervention, particularly in Rajasthan. In 2018, the Supreme Court cited the Forest Survey of India’s finding that 31 of 128 Aravalli hills had vanished in about 50 years, largely due to illegal mining. A 2025 status report from the green tribunal further reveals that, over the last 5 years, authorities have registered at least 3199 FIRs and recovered a cumulative penalty of Rs. 245.28 Crores in the Aravali Region of the State of Rajasthan.
In 2025, a citizen-led report on Haryana’s Aravalli was submitted to the Environment Ministry, listing over 60 geo-tagged sites. Mining in the Gurugram–Faridabad–Nuh belt has been banned since 2009. Gujarat’s Aravalli, especially Banaskantha, faces river-sand and mineral mining pressures with degraded landscapes slated for restoration under the Aravalli Green Wall project. In Delhi, the Ridge was notified under Section 4 of the Indian Forest Act years ago, but the final Section 20 notification with boundaries and full protection remains pending. Following pressure from the National Green Tribunal, Delhi is now set to notify the southern ridge for the first time.
If past violations and ecological damage are not startling enough, the 2021 Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas raises alarms about a broader national crisis. The report estimates that 97.85 million hectares, nearly 29.7% of India’s total area are undergoing land degradation. Analysis shows that Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Delhi, Gujarat and Goa have more than 50% of their land affected by desertification or degradation. The Aravalli Green Wall project, an ambitious plan to create a 1,400 km–long, 5 km–wide green buffer along the range, identifies the Aravalli belt as a priority zone for restoration to combat desertification.
In this context, excluding hills below 100 metres from protection is not a minor technicality but a direct threat to the Aravalli ecosystem’s remaining functional areas, as shown by extensive ecohydrological research. Studies demonstrate that microtopography and modest hillslopes significantly influence soil moisture retention, infiltration pathways and groundwater recharge, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. These rolling hills also affect wind patterns and dust transport; local terrain roughness, including vegetated hillocks, reduces erosion intensity and downwind dust loads. When covered with trees or shrubs, their ecological function further increases. It is no surprise that Delhi has not yet been desertified yet; without the Ridge acting as a barrier, dust from the western part of India would have transformed Delhi NCR into a desert.
A single legal interpretation has not driven the decline of the Aravallis; it reflects long-standing human greed and regulatory failure across all four Aravalli states, which have benefited at the ecosystem’s expense. The current interpretations may inadvertently narrow the definition in ways that could be seen as favouring past land-use patterns. Surveys by the FSI, the Central Empowered Committee, non-profits and environmental litigation records have documented the costs of chronic state inaction in the Aravalli landscape. Decades of Supreme Court intervention for a landscape disappearing from India’s map should be a reminder enough. Even the Ministry promotes a Green Wall restoration for the Aravallis, yet a new scientific definition is being recognised within legal frameworks. This is a fundamental contradiction that needs to be harmonised.
Allowing historical failures to shape future consensus in India’s environmental regulations sets a dangerous precedent, as these frameworks rarely do justice to the country’s ecological realities. Every part of the Aravalli hill system deserves to be retained and conserved, leaving no stretch behind. This is not only because they act as the natural lungs of North India or form a defining geomorphological feature of Delhi, but because they are living entities. We can plan cities, rebuild roads and bridges, and automate human workforces, but we cannot build a mountain range that predates civilisation itself.
Even if the Aravalli range must be legally defined, the decision should be guided by scientific evidence and informed by policymakers, researchers, environmentalists, legal experts, mining operators, protection bodies and citizens. In any case, the criteria should prioritise ecological value rather than height or extractive feasibility. If parts of the range are redefined out of protection, what will stop humans from targeting other fragile mountain systems next? Perhaps there are no perfect answers. Human greed often ends only after it has rationalised development for short-term profit, leaving behind deserted land, humans alone and no trace of other living beings.
The article was published with The Statesman on December 9, 2025
