Defining To Destroy: How The Legal Redefinition Of The Aravalli [2024-25] Undermines Conservation And What Framework Would Actually Work
Ekta Harwani, Jai Narain Vyas University
ABSTRACT
Measurement, when substituted for meaning, produces a law that sees mountains by height and misses what they do. The Apex court, in November 2025, through its ruling in a matter concerning the definitional framework of the Aravalli hills and ranges, approved an elevationbased definition proposed by an expert committee operating under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, which classifies the Aravalli hills at a minimum local relief of 100 meters or above as legally recognizable. The Forest Survey of India had documented 12,081 hill formations across the region; only 1,048 of those clear that bar. The 91.3 per cent excluded are not ecologically peripheral they recharge the aquifer belt that supplies three states, collectively arrest the westerly sand-bearing winds that would otherwise advance the Thar Desert eastward, and provide the connective terrain without which the Sariska–Asola wildlife corridor would collapse. Thirty-nine days after the order, the Court withdrew it not a resolution, but a confession that elevation-based governance had no ecological foundation. This paper diagnoses five structural causes of that failure and proposes, under Section 3(1) of the Environment (Protection) Act 1986, a definition tethered to what the Aravalli terrain performs its recharge, barrier, and its corridor function.
Keywords: Aravalli, Supreme Court, ecological function, continuing mandamus, Ecological Function Framework, environmental constitutionalism, mining regulation, wildlife corridors, groundwater recharge, Section 3(1), Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.
