Hills Worth More Than Ore

The recent debate around the Aravalli Hills, India’s oldest mountain range, shows why development without ecological discipline is not progress at all.

Let us be realistic at the outset by acknowledging that opposing mining outright is just a posture as fashionable as it is futile. Modern economies are built, quite literally, on what lies beneath the ground. Copper wires power homes, iron feeds steel mills, and silver hums quietly through electronics. To pretend that a fast-growing country like India can dispense with mining is to indulge in fantasy. But to pursue extraction without restraint, especially in ecologically fragile regions, is certainly not pragmatism either.

Few places capture this tension more starkly than the Aravalli Range, India’s oldest mountain system and one of its most abused. Stretching from Gujarat through Rajasthan to Delhi and Haryana, the Aravallis are not just hills to be quarried at convenience. They are a living ecological infrastructure: a natural barrier against the Thar Desert’s eastward creep, a crucial groundwater recharge zone for north-west India, and a biodiversity refuge in an otherwise arid landscape. Strip them recklessly, and the costs will be paid not in courtrooms but in collapsing water tables, dust storms and uninhabitable cities.

Clear Boundaries

India’s Supreme Court has long recognised this reality. Over the years, through reports, interim orders and final judgments, it has tried often against determined resistance to draw clear boundaries around where mining may and may not occur in the Aravallis. The effort culminated recently in a judgment that sought to settle, once and for all, how the Aravalli hills are to be defined and protected. It was a serious attempt to bring scientific clarity to what had become a playground for legal ambiguity and administrative evasion.

At the heart of this effort was a committee constituted under the court’s supervision. Its brief was deceptively simple: define the Aravalli hills in a way that is transparent, objective and conservation-oriented. Its composition reflected the gravity of the task. Senior forest officials from Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat sat alongside experts from the Forest Survey of India, the Geological Survey of India and the Central Empowered Committee, all under the stewardship of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC). This was not activism by anecdote; it was regulation by evidence.

Hazy Definition

The committee’s starting point was an uncomfortable truth. Rajasthan’s existing definition of the Aravallis, long relied upon by state authorities, was riddled with loopholes. It failed to account for hill chains, treated elevations in isolation and left vast tracts open to interpretation. This ambiguity was not accidental. It created fertile ground for mining interests to argue, hill by hill and lease by lease, that their operations fell just outside the protected zone.

To close these gaps, the committee proposed a scientifically grounded framework. Hills within 500 metres of each other were to be treated as a single chain, recognising the ecological reality that landscapes function as connected systems, not discrete mounds of rock. Protection was to extend from the crest of the hill right down to its base, rather than stopping at arbitrary contour lines convenient for excavation. Most importantly, the committee insisted on mandatory mapping of all Aravalli hills and hill chains on Survey of India toposheets before any mining could even be contemplated.

This mapping exercise was not bureaucratic pedantry. It was the foundation of a regulatory regime that could actually be enforced. Once hills and chains are officially mapped, core and inviolable zones can be clearly identified - areas where mining is prohibited outright, no matter how lucrative the ore beneath. Surrounding these would be zones where mining, if permitted at all, would be governed by stringent sustainability guidelines and subject to continuous oversight. Illegal mining, which thrives in definitional grey areas, would find far less room to operate.

The Supreme Court, to its credit, recognised the value of this approach. In its final judgment, it explicitly praised the committee’s technical inputs and recommendations on sustainable mining. It adopted the framework in full and went further, imposing an interim ban on the grant of new mining leases in the Aravalli region until a comprehensive Management Plan for Sustainable Mining (MPSM) is prepared. This was judicial activism of the sober, methodical kind.

Yet, even this carefully constructed judgment reveals the limits of incrementalism. While endorsing the committee’s work, the court also emphasised specific criteria such as a minimum 100-metre elevation threshold and slope-distance measurements to determine whether a landform qualifies as part of the Aravallis. The intention was to provide clarity and prevent overreach. But in doing so, the ruling risks missing the forest for the hills.

Ecosystems do not respect neat numerical thresholds. A hill of 95 metres does not cease to perform ecological functions denied to one of 100 metres. Groundwater recharge, biodiversity corridors and climate regulation operate across gradients, not cut-offs. By anchoring protection too tightly to elevation and slope metrics, the law invites precisely the kind of hair-splitting litigation that has plagued the Aravallis for decades. Surveyors and lawyers will argue over metres and degrees, while excavators wait impatiently nearby.

There is a more robust legal instrument available, one that the court itself has wielded before: the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980. This law allows for the protection of forested and ecologically significant land regardless of ownership or narrow land-use classifications. Crucially, it treats landscapes as ecosystems rather than as collections of extractable parcels.

The precedent is clear. In mining disputes in India’s north-east, the Supreme Court, acting on the recommendations of a committee led by Harish Salve, imposed sweeping restrictions on mining to protect fragile forest areas. The logic was simple: where ecological damage is irreversible and systemic, the precautionary principle must prevail. Economic activity may resume only when it can be shown credibly and independently that it will not undermine the life-support systems on which communities depend.

The Aravallis merit the same treatment. They are not a marginal landscape but a linchpin of environmental stability for north-west India, including the National Capital Region. Delhi’s air pollution, Rajasthan’s water scarcity and Haryana’s soil degradation are all linked, in part, to the slow destruction of this ancient range. To regulate mining here through a patchwork of elevation criteria and conditional permissions is to underestimate both the scale of the threat and the value of what is at stake.

This does not mean sealing the Aravallis in amber. Sustainable mining, in carefully identified zones and under uncompromising oversight, is not heresy. But sustainability cannot be declared by committee alone; it must be enforced by law with teeth. Invoking the Forest (Conservation) Act would shift the burden of proof decisively. Instead of regulators having to justify why an area should be protected, miners would have to demonstrate why extraction would not cause irreparable harm.

India’s development debate is often framed as a crude choice between growth and green. The Aravalli case exposes this as a false dichotomy. The real choice is between short-term extraction and long-term resilience. Minerals can be imported, substituted or recycled. Ecosystems, once destroyed, are not so easily replaced.

In that sense, the Supreme Court’s intervention is both commendable and incomplete. It has brought much-needed scientific rigour to the definition of the Aravallis and erected temporary barriers against a fresh rush of mining leases. But unless this effort is anchored in a broader ecological legal framework, the old games will resume under new guises.

India’s oldest mountains have survived tectonic upheavals and millennia of erosion. Whether they survive the next few decades of ‘development’ will depend less on geology than on governance. Mining may be indispensable. But the Aravallis are irreplaceable. And a serious country should know the difference between the two.