Aravallis: Making a Molehill out of a Mountain

A rose, we have been told, is a rose is a rose. Mountains are different. Mountains tower over the plains and valleys, creating a barrier to wind, sand, and encroaching desert. They host forests and diverse life forms, including human communities, besides troves of assorted minerals. Mountains trap rain clouds and force them to discharge their burden, trap the water in crevasses and crevices and discharge them as springs and through underground aquifers. Mountains, in other words, are potential mines, barriers against desertification and polluting fine dust, home to biodiversity, sites for construction, and providers of water. The same land formation has multiple functional identities, each spawning champions and vested interests.

Small wonder, then, that experts cannot reach an agreement on what constitutes the Aravalli mountain range, the oldest fold mountain range in India. Fold mountains get their name from the folding and upward protrusion at the edge that happens when one tectonic plate presses against another, and neither is prepared to budge.

Whether an expanse of land is part of a mountain or not matters, when it comes to its eligibility for commercial exploitation, for mining or residential real estate. This is why the definition of what constitutes a segment of the Aravalli becomes a matter for judicial determination.

The Aravalli range spans four states in northwest India: Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi. But because its utilisation is governed by the laws of the land, and these laws have cause and effect across the whole of India, the current controversy over the Aravalli has a strange link to the distant Western Ghats, to the west of which lies the state of Kerala. Anthropology prevails over mere geography.

Kerala is one of the few states of India to undertake rigorous land reforms. The state passed laws to create ceilings for how much land an individual could own, and to vest private forests in the government, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, under different Communist chief ministers. The Nilambur Kovilakam (Malayalam for royal household) lost some 120,000 acres of forest land, as a result, some of which vested in the government of Tamil Nadu. The state government, however, failed to protect the forests as it had been protected under private stewardship, and tree felling and timber smuggling out of the forest became rampant.

A member of the erstwhile royal family, T N Godavarman Thirumulpad, petitioned the Supreme Court, in 1995, complaining about the state of affairs. The Court decreed the government had the duty to protect forests, across India, not just forests as classified under different laws but all areas that are forests as per the dictionary definition of the term. The law continues, in the form of what lawyers call continuing mandamus.

This spawned a spate of appeals, over a thousand of them, from forests in the Northeast to the Aravallis, where commercial work was interrupted. To process all these claims, the Court created a Central Empowered Committee, comprising forest experts with administrative experience. The continuing mandamus from the Godavarman ruling applies, while determining the legality of mining operations in the Aravallis.

The four states across which the Aravallis sprawl have different ways of identifying a hill or a hillock as part of the Aravalli range. The Court wanted to create a uniform definition.

In 2010, a Supreme Court-appointed committee comprising Forest Survey of India personnel came up with a definition. The Aravallis in the four states would comprise any elevation with a slope three degrees or more, and 100 metres from the base of the slope constituting a buffer zone. This would protect ridges and hillocks smaller than 100 metres in elevation from the local relief.

This definition inconvenienced many people, particularly would-be miners, who saw their mother lode disappear into a Protected Area as per that definition.

In 2023, the Government of India changed the law on Forest conservation, narrowly defining Forest as area recorded as forest in official records, drawing protest from environmental activists, who say this removed from the Court’s protection some 200,000 sq km of deemed forest land.  The Supreme Court is still hearing a challenge to this amendment.

Mining in the Aravallis are under challenge in the Supreme Court under two different cases. One pertains to Rajasthan under the continuing mandamus from the Godavarman ruling. The other pertains to Haryana, under public interest litigation brought by MC Mehta. The Court saw that Haryana and Rajasthan had differing definitions for what constituted a part of the Aravallis, and formed a nine-member committee to form a new definition. Why this was needed, when it already had with it a definition supplied, in 2010, by a committee the Court itself had appointed, is a mystery.

This nine-member committee of experts actually comprised six civil servants, one of whom chaired the committee, and three experts. They came up with a definition borrowed from Rajasthan, leaning to pragmatism and administrative ease, rather than technical integrity. The new definition has two parts. Any hill 100 metres in elevation from the local relief in an Aravalli district would be an Aravalli hill. Any two Aravalli hills separated by less than 500 metres, form a part of the Aravalli range, including valleys, ridges, etc between the hills.

The three technical members in the committee, representing the Forest Survey of India, the Geological Survey of India and the Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee, all objected to this definition. But the six civil servants — secretaries for Forests of the four states, secretary and joint secretary to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change — decided by majority to approve this definition.

The definition is unsound, even to a layman. If, instead of measuring  height from a uniform base, such as the sea level, you make the local relief the base, a 100 metres tall mount on the plain would qualify as an Aravalli hill while a 50 metres tall mount on an elevated plateau that is itself 60 metres above the sea level, would fail to qualify as an Aravalli hill, even when the highest point of either is exactly 110 metres above mean sea level. You could take an excavator to all the hillocks that are less than 100 metres, when measured from the local relief, and still be fully compliant with the law.

The Aravalli range is an integrated system. If you knock down a part of it, you take away some of its integrity. Take a Lata Mangeshkar song, Ajeeb dastan hai yeh or Lag ja gale. Now, suppose the beauty of these songs derives from the high notes the singer strikes and holds without faltering. How would you like it if someone sought to reduce these songs to those high-pitch stretches, and treat all the rest as expendable noise? Sounds like an attempt to slaughter the songs, right?

The 100-metre definition amounts to attempted mountain slaughter. This is how it struck many people after the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to the 100-metre definition on 20 November. Since then, media reports brought out the fact that only less than 9% of the 12,000 hills in Rajasthan would meet the 100-metre from local relief criterion. The Chittorgarh Fort of Rani Padmini and Rana Pratap fame would stand stripped of its Aravalli identity.

As public wrath rose in the media, the Supreme Court took action on its own, and stayed its own 20 November recognition of the 100-metre definition. It has called for yet another, what else, committee of experts.

We, in Delhi, are partial to keeping further sand and dust from the Thar desert screened out from the National Capital Region. We generate enough suspended particulate matter of our own, thank you. This bias aside, it is important, in principle, to strike a sustainable balance in the inevitable tradeoff between development, which necessarily alters nature, and protection of the environment. Mountain slaughter by definition does not cut it.