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From Living Landscapes to Extractable Matter: The Aravalli Verdict in Perspective

Ritu Rao

On November 20, 2025, the Supreme Court adopted a narrowly drawn, technically framed definition of the Aravalli Hills, restricting their recognition to landforms rising 100 metres or more from the local relief, along with their slopes and associated landforms.

According to recent media reports, this elevation-based benchmark effectively excludes more than 90% of the number of hills in Rajasthan that were previously treated as belonging to the Aravallis – India’s oldest mountain range, formed during the Precambrian era (4.6 BYA – 541 MYA). Environmentalists, urban planners and conservationists warn that this definition could expose extensive landscapes to mining and construction, as a large number of hills may no longer fall under environmental safeguards previously associated with the Aravalli designation. Although the ruling also directs the Union government to conduct scientific mapping and prepare a sustainable mining management plan, critics contend that the real implications lie in the new definition. The deeper significance of this judgement becomes clearer when viewed within a longer historical arc – the shift from an organic conception of nature to a mechanistic one that began in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

When nature was alive, sacred, and self-regulating

For many centuries, communities viewed the world through an organic lens – one in which the cosmos, the natural world, and human life formed a living interdependent whole. Nature was imagined as a fertile, nurturing mother, and this image placed subtle but powerful ethical constraints on how people could act toward the environment. Such portrayals worked as cultural constraints against forceful intrusions like deep mining, large-scale clearing of forests, or unrestrained extraction of natural resources.

As Carolyn Merchant notes in The Death of Nature, miners once approached the earth with ritual reverence: they observed purification rites, practiced abstinence, and performed acts of propitiation, believing that digging into the earth’s body was a violation of her sanctity. These symbolic understandings established a set of moral boundaries – practical “oughts” and “ought-nots” – that regulated commercial and technological activities and helped curb destructive tendencies.

The rise of the mechanistic worldview: Nature and humans as resources

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the earlier understanding of the cosmos and society as an interconnected organic whole began to fade under the accelerating pressures of commercial expansion, technological innovation, and the early currents of capitalism in Western Europe. As the scientific revolution took hold, the image of a nurturing, animate earth was displaced by a mechanistic worldview that treated nature as inert, disorderly matter awaiting rational control. Natural processes were no longer understood as the cyclical rhythms of an organism but as the predictable operations of a machine. With this shift, long-standing cultural restraints on mining and extraction weakened: what had once bordered on sacrilege now appeared as a legitimate – and even celebrated – act of technical mastery. The earth ceased to be a mother demanding reverence and became a storehouse of resources to be opened, partitioned, and exploited.

This transformation did not stop at the natural world. As nature was reimagined as dead matter, human beings – especially those rendered vulnerable through conquest – were likewise absorbed into an extractive logic. The mechanistic worldview fit seamlessly with the emerging structures of commercial capitalism and European imperial expansion. As Amitav Ghosh argues in The Nutmeg’s Curse, capitalism did not arise internally within Europe; instead, its expansion depended on colonial conquest, the genocidal displacement of indigenous peoples, and the large-scale enslavement of Native Americans and Africans. Through the military and geopolitical dominance of Western empires, small ruling elites acquired unprecedented control over vast populations – their labour, bodies, belief systems, and environments – mirroring the new conception of the earth as raw material to be dominated.

In this sense, the collapse of the organic worldview between 1500 and 1700 was far more than an intellectual transition; it marked a profound cultural, political, and ecological rupture. The mechanistic model dissolved earlier ethical limits and made both nature and human beings available as resources – an orientation that continues to shape modern systems of power, economy, and environmental degradation today.

The persistence of extractive logic

Seen in this longer historical frame, the Supreme Court’s November 2025 judgment reflects a contemporary expression of the mechanistic worldview. By reducing the Aravallis to a numerical height threshold, the ruling converts a richly interconnected ecological landscape into a narrow technical category. Many features vital to groundwater recharge, climate regulation, biodiversity conservation, pollution and heat-wave mitigation, and desertification control across Northwest India – including the NCR – such as low ridges and hillocks are effectively erased from legal recognition. Any hill that fails to meet the 100-metre criterion is reclassified as “non-Aravalli” and therefore becomes potentially available for mining, real-estate development, and construction.

The judgement illustrates how mechanistic reasoning increasingly shapes environmental governance: landscapes are parsed into discrete, quantifiable units that can be opened, fragmented, and monetised. As in the seventeenth century, elements of nature that once benefited from protection – whether grounded in law, cultural ethics, or ecological understanding – is now vulnerable to extraction under the banner of technical rationality.

Colonisation reimagined

Local communities living in and around the Aravallis as in other parts of the country and world are increasingly cast as impediments to development rather than recognised as long-standing custodians of the land. Their ties to land, livelihoods, and cultural spaces are subordinated to industrial and commercial priorities, echoing older colonial patterns in which local ways of life were dismissed as impediments to ‘progress.’ Mining has already damaged their access to farming and drinking water and has undermined their health. Dust and fine particulates from mining and stone-crushing operations trigger or worsen respiratory illnesses. Agriculture declines as vegetation loss and groundwater depletion make the region more arid, while contaminated runoff from mining sites degrades soils. Mining also disrupts aquifers, causing wells to run dry and leaving available water heavily silted.

Much like colonial empires that legitimised extraction through categories imposed by maps, measurements, and legal constructs, the definition of the Aravallis in the recent judgement manufactures extractable space by reshaping the very terms through which natural features are understood, all under the guise of technical logic. What was once protected as an ecologically interdependent system is recast as a divisible and negotiable commodity, its worth measured not by ecological function or human relationships but by its potential for exploitation.

Challenging the mechanistic legacy

The Supreme Court’s judgment is not an isolated legal event; it stands within a long intellectual and political trajectory stretching back five centuries. The dismantling of the organic worldview and the rise of mechanistic rationality enabled the capitalist systems of extraction, colonisation, and ecological devastation that shaped the modern world. By removing protection from more than 90 percent of the number of hills in the Aravallis in Rajasthan, the Court’s decision repeats this logic: nature becomes inert matter waiting to be converted into economic value, and communities become collateral to that conversion.

Yet this worldview is increasingly out of step with contemporary global ethics. Across the world, an alternative vision is gaining ground. From the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the Ganga and Yamuna in India, from Ecuador’s constitution to citizens in Germany seeking rights for the River Spree, the Rights of Nature movement reflects a profound moral shift: nature is not property—it is a living system with its own rights. Recognizing ecosystems as legal persons is not radical; it merely enables their well-being to be defended in court through guardians acting on their behalf.

This global turn toward a vitalist ethic underscores what the Aravalli judgment overlooks: that human well-being depends on treating nature as kin, rather than a quarry. At a moment when an alternative worldview grounded in ecological reciprocity is on the rise, the Supreme Court’s ruling moves in the opposite direction. It is a reminder that the struggle to move beyond the mechanistic worldview remains urgent – and that the fate of our natural heritage, like the Aravallis, will determine whether we choose extraction or stewardship, domination or care, destruction or life.

[Ritu Rao works with the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) on various natural heritage projects. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]

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Aravallis on Trial: When Law Protects Profit, Not Life

Adityakrishna Deora

The Supreme Court’s recent acceptance of an elevation-based definition of the Aravalli hills – restricting legal protection to landforms rising more than 100 metres above local relief – marks a decisive rupture in India’s environmental jurisprudence. Presented as a neutral, scientific clarification, the ruling reportedly effectively removes legal safeguards from nearly 90% of the Aravalli system in Rajasthan.

What is being redefined is not merely a geological formation, but the ecological backbone of north-western India and the basis of life for millions of Adivasi, pastoralist and agrarian communities.

The Aravallis are among the oldest mountain systems in the world. They function as groundwater recharge zones, climate regulators and ecological buffers against the eastward march of the Thar desert. To reduce such a living system to a single metric of elevation is to misunderstand ecology itself. More critically, it signals a shift in the role of law – from restraining extractive impulses to actively enabling them.

Early Medieval Ethics of Ecology in Rajasthan

Popular political discourse on Rajasthan often obsesses over pre-eighteenth century conflicts between local kingdoms and Turkic or Timurid powers. Historically, however, the region has also been a theatre of conflict between agrarian–pastoral–tribal societies and urban–mercantile interests, particularly from the late medieval period.

Rajasthan’s ecological consciousness is neither modern nor imported. As early as the fifteenth century, Guru Jambeshwar – revered as Guru Jambhoji and born into the Parmar Rajput farming community – articulated a moral framework that placed the protection of trees, wildlife and water at the centre of social duty. His teachings emerged from the lived realities of arid-zone pastoral and agrarian life, where restraint was essential for collective survival.

This ethic was not confined to a single tradition. Meghrishi, regarded as the founding sage of the Meghwal community, articulated a philosophy of labour, land and restraint that bound artisanal and agrarian livelihoods to sustainable resource use – a legacy still visible among Meghwals, Jingars, Regars and other Dalit communities of the region. Harbuji Sankhla, revered as a panchpir and protector figure across western Rajasthan, survives in oral traditions as a guardian of cattle, grasslands and village commons, symbolising the moral economy that tied warrior-pastoral societies to ecological stewardship.

This tradition found its most tragic expression in 1730 at Khejarli, when Amrita Devi Bishnoi and hundreds from her community sacrificed their lives to stop the felling of khejri trees. The order had been issued by Giridhari Bhandari, an overzealous Khatri official of the Marwar state acting in the name of revenue extraction. Crucially, the ruler Abhai Singh punished Bhandari and institutionalised protections for Bishnoi lands, recognising unchecked extraction as a moral and political excess.

In sharp contrast, the present moment has seen the highest judicial body itself validate regulatory dilution.

Adivasi Predicament: Livelihood, Land and Cultural Survival

Bharat Adivasi Party Member of Parliament Rajkumar Roat, representing the Banswara-Dungarpur constituency, has emerged as one of the most consistent political voices opposing the revised definition of the Aravalli hills. Roat has warned that stripping legal protection from large parts of the range threatens not only Rajasthan’s ecological future but also the survival of tribal and forest-dependent communities.

For Adivasi groups such as Bhils, Meenas and Girasiyas, the Aravallis are not simply ecological assets but inhabited landscapes – spaces of work, worship and memory. Forests and hill commons support subsistence agriculture, grazing, minor forest produce and seasonal migration. Mining expansion in these areas does not merely degrade the environment; it destabilises social systems, pushing families into displacement, wage precarity and urban distress.

The legal implications are equally severe. Mining and associated infrastructure often proceed by bypassing or diluting rights recognised under the Forest Rights Act (2006), particularly community forest rights intended to protect collective access to land and resources.

In Scheduled Areas, such decisions also undermine the spirit and letter of PESA (1996), which mandates gram sabha consent in matters affecting land and natural resources. Roat’s intervention highlights a recurring pattern: policies with irreversible consequences for Adivasi lifeworlds are framed as technical or economic decisions, insulated from democratic scrutiny.

Beyond livelihood loss lies cultural erasure. Sacred groves, burial grounds, hill deities and seasonal rituals tied to the Aravalli landscape face destruction when hills are blasted or fenced off. Weakening legal protection thus accelerates not only ecological degradation but also cultural alienation, severing intergenerational ties between communities and land. In this sense, the ruling reproduces a colonial logic that treats Adivasi territories as underutilised spaces available for extraction.

Agrarian and pastoral apprehensions

Opposition to the ruling is equally rooted in agrarian and pastoral anxieties. Independent legislator Ravindra Bhati has pointed to a central contradiction: the elevation-based definition was advanced by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, headed by Bhupender Yadav – also the Member of Parliament from Alwar, a district embedded within the Aravalli belt. Bhati’s question is pointed: how does a representative of an ecologically fragile region come to preside over a framework that weakens its protection?

For peasant communities – Malis, Rajputs, Bishnois and Meghwals – the Aravallis sustain agriculture in a semi-arid landscape through groundwater recharge and soil stability. Mining disrupts these systems, lowering water tables and increasing vulnerability to drought. Pastoral groups such as Rebaris, Bharwads and Kalbeliyas face even sharper consequences: quarrying fragments grazing routes, destroys scrublands and hill pastures, and restricts access to commons essential for livestock-based economies.

Bhati’s concerns extend beyond mining through his leadership of the Oran Bachao Andolan, resisting the diversion of sacred grasslands in the Thar for large solar and infrastructure projects. Orans, like the Aravallis, function as grazing reserves and water-recharge zones; their enclosure reflects a broader pattern of commons being repurposed for corporate-led development.

Grassroots resistance has also emerged outside formal politics. Army veteran Jairam Singh Tanwar mobilised villagers in Rajasthan’s Sikar region against illegal mining that scarred hills and depleted groundwater, illustrating how communities are often forced to confront extractive interests directly when regulatory protection weakens.

For these societies, the dilution of Aravalli protections is not a technical adjustment but an existential threat, signalling the erosion of water security, commons and livelihoods.

Legal dilution disguised as technical clarity

Indian environmental law has long recognised ecological complexity. The Forest Conservation Act, 1980, the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and judicial doctrines such as the Precautionary Principle, Public Trust Doctrine and Intergenerational Equity were designed to prevent precisely such piecemeal erosion.

By privileging elevation over ecological function, the ruling risks hollowing out these safeguards. Although the court has directed scientific mapping and a management plan for sustainable mining, the redefinition ensures that large tracts will fall outside scrutiny altogether.

Health, environment and social costs of mining

Expanded mining will intensify air pollution, groundwater depletion and chemical contamination, outcomes already documented across Rajasthan’s limestone and marble belts. Public health impacts include respiratory disease, water scarcity and heat stress, disproportionately borne by rural populations.

These ecological disruptions cascade into economic distress for small farmers, pastoralists, dairy producers and village-level traders, even as mining leases and infrastructure contracts concentrate in the hands of a few large corporate actors.

Crony capitalism with sanction

The Aravalli ruling exemplifies state-sanctioned crony capitalism. Mining allocations have historically favoured dominant business groups with access to capital and political patronage, while small operators and local economies are edged out. The beneficiaries of deregulation are not ‘industry’ in general, but a narrow class of corporate interests.

The irony is stark: Giridhari Bhandari was punished for overreach in the eighteenth century; today, similar impulses are legitimised through law, with consequences far more extensive.

Representation without responsibility

The decision also exposes the hollowing out of democratic accountability. Districts embedded within the Aravallis – Alwar, Udaipur, Rajsamand, Dungarpur and Banswara – send representatives to parliament and state assemblies, yet decisions shaping these landscapes are increasingly insulated from local voices.

Environmental governance has shifted from communities and legislatures to courts and executive committees, where technocratic language masks political choices. Streamlined clearances, weakened public hearings and strategic exemptions together produce a governance model that speaks of sustainability while dismantling its foundations.

A rupture with history

The Aravallis have endured for over a billion years because local societies, across centuries, recognised their ecological worth and organised life around principles of restraint and sustainability. The Supreme Court’s decision marks a rupture with that historical wisdom, placing the authority of law behind extraction rather than restraint.

This is not merely a legal error. It is a civilisational choice, one whose costs will be paid not in courtrooms, but in fields, forests and forgotten lives.

[Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]

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Redefining Aravallis: Theft of the Commons

Shirin Akhter

The recent judicial executive move to impose a narrow, height-based definition of the Aravalli Range marks a troubling moment in India’s environmental governance. Traditionally, the Aravallis were understood as a continuous mountain system stretching over hundreds of kilometres from Delhi through Haryana and Rajasthan into Gujarat, across dozens of districts as an interconnected range that forms a natural barrier against desertification, supports rivers and watersheds, and sustains biodiversity and local livelihoods.

This ecological continuity reflected in historical geographic characterisations of the Aravalli Range, as a continuous fold mountain belt running from Delhi to Ahmedabad, has underpinned legal and conservation frameworks that treated the hills and their attendant ridges, foreshore landforms, and catchment areas as an indivisible whole. By recognising only landforms rising 100 metres or more above the surrounding terrain as “Aravalli hills,” the State has reduced one of the world’s oldest and most fragile ecological systems to a cartographic abstraction. What is projected as scientific clarity is, in effect, ecological amnesia, carrying grave consequences for environmental protection, federalism, and democratic accountability.

Opposition leaders have been unequivocal in flagging the dangers of this exercise. Congress leader and former Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has described the redefinition as a bureaucratic sleight of hand that quietly erases large swathes of the Aravallis from legal protection without any transparent public debate on ecological costs. This arbitrary vertical threshold forgets that the Aravallis function as a continuous ecological system, where low-lying hills, forested ridges, scrublands, and catchment areas together sustain groundwater recharge, regulate dust and temperature, and support biodiversity across Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi, and Gujarat.

By tying protection to height, the State effectively decouples ecology from law. This is precisely what environmentalists and Opposition voices warn against. Former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has pointed out that the move opens the door to renewed mining and real-estate pressures in precisely those zones that have historically borne the brunt of ecological destruction. These are areas that may not tower dramatically above the landscape but are indispensable to the integrity of the range. To exclude them is to hollow out protection while claiming compliance.

Mining Contracts and Political Economy of Redefinition

The redefinition cannot be understood outside the political economy of mining contracts. The Aravallis are mined not for strategic minerals but for quartzite, stone, sand, aggregates, and limestone, the raw materials of highways, flyovers, luxury housing, and urban infrastructure. These are low-value minerals extracted in high volumes, classified as “minor minerals,” and, therefore, governed by weaker regulatory scrutiny. Redrawing the legal boundary of what constitutes the Aravallis directly affects which parcels of land can be leased, auctioned, or diverted with ease.

This is where the government’s clarification assumes significance. While asserting that the new definition applies only to mining, and reiterating that mining is prohibited in the NCR (National Capital Region), the Union Environment Minister has simultaneously made it clear that restrictions will not apply to the mining of “critical, strategic, and atomic minerals” listed under the First and Seventh Schedules of the Mining and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957.

The technical committee’s report goes further, recording the Rajasthan government’s assertion that the Aravallis contain deep-seated minerals falling under these schedules. In effect, while public discussion is steered toward minor minerals, the legal framework deliberately keeps the door open for extraction that can be justified as strategically or economically important.

The report itself acknowledges that beneath the surface, the Aravalli Range holds substantial mineral wealth, including marble, granite, mica, and other minerals that have historically fuelled construction and extraction across the region. This acknowledgement is wrapped in familiar language about balancing development and conservation. Yet, the exemptions embedded in the framework tell a more revealing story.

By recommending that mining restrictions “need not apply” to critical, strategic, and atomic minerals on grounds of defence and national security, the policy regime creates a hierarchy of extraction, where ecological protection is no longer a principle but a conditional privilege.

Environmentalists have, therefore, warned that the redefinition functions less as a safeguard than as an open-ended licence. As forest analyst Chetan Agarwal has pointed out, the combined effect of the new definition and the statutory exemptions is that mining for critical minerals would be permissible both in areas above 100 metres that are legally recognised as Aravallis and in areas below 100 metres that are legally rendered non-Aravalli hills. Whether one adopts the Forest Survey of India’s slope-based criteria or the Ministry’s height-based definition, future mining is not ruled out. At best, the framework promises uniform scrutiny. It does not promise ecological restraint.

Seen this way, the redefinition is not about scientific precision. It is about regulatory reordering. It preserves flexibility for mining interests under the shifting banners of development, growth, and national security, while steadily shrinking the space of unconditional ecological protection. What is being stabilised is not conservation, but the State’s discretion to extract, leaving the ecological integrity of the Aravallis to be negotiated, diluted, and overridden as required.

Once hills and ridges fall outside the formal definition, they become administratively invisible as ecologically protected spaces and legally legible as extractable real estate. In this sense, the redefinition does not curb mining; it reorganises mining opportunities. It converts contested landscapes into contract-friendly terrain. The redefinition legalises vulnerability.

Critiques insist that the issue is not scientific disagreement but state-enabled extraction. The language of “uniform definitions” masks a deeper redistribution of ecological risk from corporations and contractors to landscapes and communities that lack political power.

Sonbhadra is another case in the point, it shows where this logic ultimately leads. Often described as the energy capital of North India, Sonbhadra is rich in coal and dotted with thermal power plants that supply electricity to distant cities and industrial hubs. It is also one of the starkest examples of how State greed, legitimised through development discourse, devastates nature and people alike.

Decades of coal mining, fly ash dumping, forest clearance, and thermal pollution have left Sonbhadra environmentally scarred and socially impoverished. Adivasi and forest-dependent communities have been repeatedly displaced, their land acquired in the name of national interest, their water poisoned, and their livelihoods eroded. Despite fuelling urban growth elsewhere, Sonbhadra itself remains marked by poverty, poor health indicators, and ecological ruin.

Sonbhadra is not an aberration. It is a preview. It demonstrates how resource-rich regions are turned into sacrifice zones, where nature is stripped, communities are marginalised, and the benefits of extraction flow outward. The same logic now looms over the Aravallis, albeit through quieter legal instruments rather than overt dispossession.

Natural Justice, Commons, and Question of Who Pays

What is strikingly absent from the redefinition of the Aravallis, and from extractive governance more broadly, is any serious engagement with the law of natural justice. At its most elementary level, natural justice rests on the principles of fairness and the right to be heard. Yet in the appropriation of natural resources and common-pool resources (CPRs), these principles are routinely violated. Decisions that reshape landscapes, livelihoods, and ecological futures are taken without involving and without a concern towards communities who live with their immediate consequences.

Hills, forests, grazing lands, water bodies, and mineral-bearing tracts are not inert assets waiting to be monetised. For local communities, pastoralists in the Aravallis, adivasis in Sonbhadra, forest dwellers and small cultivators across extractive belts, they constitute shared ecological commons, governed by customary use, collective knowledge, and intergenerational dependence. When the State redraws ecological boundaries, dilutes protections, or facilitates mining through redefinition and reclassification, it does so by dispossessing those most dependent on these resources, often without meaningful consultation, consent, or remedy.

This is distributive injustice. The benefits of extraction, mining contracts, construction material, electricity, urban infrastructure, flow upwards and outwards to corporations, contractors, and distant cities. The costs, displacement, loss of livelihoods, groundwater depletion, toxic air and water, long-term health damage, are localised and borne by communities with the least political power. Those who profit from extraction are insulated from its harms; those who suffer its effects are excluded from decision-making. Such an asymmetry violates the moral core of natural justice: no group should be made to bear burdens from which others reap gains without accountability or participation.

Sonbhadra offers a grim illustration of where this logic leads. Coal and power extracted in the name of national development have left behind ecological ruin, chronic poverty, and dispossessed communities. The Aravallis now risk being drawn into the same trajectory, less dramatically, perhaps, but no less decisively, through a legal sleight that converts ecological commons into contract-ready terrain. What is at stake is not simply environmental damage, but the erosion of natural rights: the right of communities to land, water, livelihood, and a sustainable future.

Environmental degradation also violates an often-overlooked dimension of natural justice, the obligation to do no irreversible harm. When ecosystems are destroyed in ways that foreclose future options, the injury extends beyond the present generation. It robs communities of resilience, adaptability, and dignity, while accountability for such harm remains diffuse or absent. Growth achieved by externalising damage onto the poor and the peripheral cannot claim legitimacy, however technically legal it may appear.

[Shirin Akhter is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. Courtesy: Newsclick, an Indian news website founded by Prabir Purkayastha in 2009, who also serves as the Editor-in-Chief.]