Protecting the Aravalli mountain range from mining has been mired in a confusing welter of committees seeking the accurate definition of a mountain range. Under scrutiny is the latest high-powered committee appointed by the Supreme Court by an order dated May 25, 2026, to review the findings of an earlier committee of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), itself appointed by the apex court in May 2024 to “have a uniform definition of the Aravalli hills and ranges”.

On November 20, 2025, the Supreme Court accepted the contentious height-based definition proposed by the MoEF&CC in its report of October 13, 2025: that the Aravallis should constitute hill ranges above 100 metres, with a range defined as two or more hills located within 500 metres of each other. K. Parameshwar, the amicus curiae for the case, in his detailed submission to the apex court in February 2026, said that if this definition was accepted, all hills below 100 metres would be opened up for mining and the Aravallis would lose their continuity and integrity.

This definition sparked nationwide outrage. On December 29, 2025, the apex court decided to appoint a high-powered expert committee which was formally constituted by its order on May 25, 2026, to ensure a fair, impartial, and independent expert opinion to review the MoEF&CC’s October 2025 report. However, this has provoked fresh objections.

Environmentalists, members of the Aravalli Virasat Jan Abhiyaan, retired forest officials, and others criticised the committee’s composition. It comprises the Director General, Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE), as ex officio chairperson, along with retired officials from the Forest Survey of India (FSI), the Geological Survey of India, the MoEF&CC, and a former head of botany at Delhi University as members. The apex court also directed that an officer of the rank of Director in the MoEF&CC would be nominated by the government to serve as the member secretary.

The Aravalli Virasat Jan Abhiyaan wrote to the Chief Justice of India on June 16, 2026, demanding changes in the composition of the new committee and an expansion of its terms of reference to protect what is left of the highly vulnerable range. The letter, endorsed by over 130 activists and individuals, demanded that the government be directed to mainstream alternative building materials so that the use of virgin stone mined from Aravalli hills in Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat is stopped. The uniform definition accepted by the November 20, 2025 Supreme Court order must be scrapped, it said, and what remains of the 700-km Aravalli range should be declared a “Critical Ecological Zone” based on its significance for the ecosystem services the range provides for millions of people and wildlife.

The letter also demanded that the committee direct an independent and cumulative social, health, and environmental impact study of the entire Aravalli range—to ascertain the extent of damage to the ecosystem and livelihoods, and the health impacts of mining pollution, waste dumping, and burning over the past 50 years. Such a study, it said, must draw on institutional expertise from diverse fields on the lines of what the Supreme Court adopted in mining matters in the ecologically sensitive areas of Goa, Karnataka, and Odisha. The committee, the letter added, must also calculate the loss and damage caused by mining and fix liability under the “Polluter Pays Principle”.

In separate letters to the Chief Justice, on June 18 and 19, several environmentalists and scientists objected to the committee’s constitution. Dr Ravi Chopra, founder director of the People’s Science Institute, Dehradun, stated that he had chaired two committees formed on the orders of the Supreme Court, and in both instances it was his “disappointing experience that serving and retired government officials and scientists from government-funded institutions on the committees never voted against the views of the government in power, despite orally expressing opinions to the contrary during discussions”. Since almost all members of this committee are serving or retired government officials, he wrote, he had grave doubts about their ability to express unbiased opinions on contested issues.

Kailash Meena, an anti-mining campaigner from Rajasthan, said it was also imperative for the new committee to review the rules of the different Aravalli states regarding water-extractive activities such as mining and dust-washing plants being permitted in blocks that are already water-scarce. A review is also required of conditions in the existing environmental clearance documents of licensed mines in the Aravalli belt, he said, which state that “mining operations should not intersect ground water table but if it does it should be with the permission of the Central Ground Water Authority”. Mining , he said was causing ground water levels to fall to dangerously low levels across the Aravalli range, and rural communities had no water left for drinking or irrigating their fields.

Adivasi communities demand a hearing

Sadhna Meena, a Bhil Adivasi leader from South Rajasthan who works with mining-affected communities, said: “We demand a participatory, in-person, and transparent process of public consultation by the new committee, and the committee must visit villages in Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat to examine the impacts of mining.” She said that mining, toxic landfills, and waste dumping had impacted the aquifers lying beneath the Aravallis. Mining also dried up or polluted rivers, and stone crushers across the Aravalli belt worked non-stop, raising silica dust in the air and causing silicosis among other illnesses. Already many hills were razed to the ground. Apart from the disease burden faced by residents, there is declining livestock numbers and crop productivity, and shrinking land for grazing.

An independent expert, an environmentalist, ecologist, or scientist, with knowledge of the Aravalli region and no reporting relationship to the MoEF&CC must be appointed as chairperson, said Lokesh Bhiwani, a climate activist and member of the Aravalli Virasat Jan Abhiyaan from Haryana. “To obtain a fair, impartial, independent expert opinion to protect the highly vulnerable Aravalli range and to make the new committee in reality a High-Powered Expert Committee, we demand that the Supreme Court order constituting the committee be modified such that the chairperson and member secretary of the new committee should not be a serving officer of the MoEF&CC or any of its autonomous councils, bodies, or authorities,” he suggested.

A suppressed report

Even before the new committee was announced, there were other contentious issues. Neelam Ahluwalia, co-founder of the Aravalli Virasat Jan Abhiyaan—a broad coalition of environmentalists, ecologists, community leaders, civil society groups, social activists, researchers, lawyers, and rural and urban residents across the Aravalli States—pointed out that the amicus curiae’s submissions in February 2026 raised serious concerns about the manner in which the MoEF&CC handled the report of the committee headed by its own secretary. The MoEF&CC’s report, submitted to the Supreme Court as part of an affidavit dated October 13, 2025, was unsigned and undated.

Crucially, the report did not mention the findings of a technical sub-committee of the FSI—appointed by the MoEF&CC itself—to examine the issue, as the amicus curiae’s submission revealed. This technical sub-committee was tasked with finalising “the methodology for arriving at a uniform definition of Aravalli hills and ranges taking into account relevant data sets.” The FSI report, submitted on September 22, 2025 to the MoEF&CC, explicitly states the need to protect the region from further degradation. It defined the Aravalli hills and ranges as “pieces of land higher than their surroundings in areas identified as Aravalli(s) in published reports, books, datasets, maps, and atlases, and including demarcated hills and linear arrangements of such hills”.

The FSI report made a pointed argument about even modest hills. “The smaller hill formations of the Aravallis serve as natural barriers against desertification by stopping heavier sand particles—ones that cannot travel to greater heights—thus protecting Delhi and neighbouring plains from sandstorms. Because the protective effect of a barrier against wind-blown sand scales directly with its height, even modest hills of 10–30 m[etres] act as strong natural windbreaks, creating sheltered zones that extend many times their height downwind and thereby effectively halting near surface sand transport. Larger hills further filter finer pollutants like PM 2.5 that can travel higher, up to around 1,000 metres, helping to improve air quality in one of the world’s most polluted urban clusters.”

Relying on the Public Trust Doctrine of the Supreme Court of India, the FSI report said that the Aravallis must be regarded as “a shared natural endowment requiring the highest standards of stewardship. Far from being an ordinary hill system, they are an ancient, fragile, and irreplaceable landscape, already severely stressed by human activity, yet especially essential for shielding Delhi and the NCR from sandstorms and pollution, and of enduring scientific and pedagogical value as one of the world’s oldest geological formations.” It recommended a range of regulatory measures: no mining in Protected Areas and Eco Sensitive Zones, in habitats of endemic, threatened, or scheduled species, or in ecological connectivity zones including tiger corridors, avian flyways such as those used by the Great Indian Bustard or the Sarus Crane, or aquatic migration routes and watersheds.

The FSI also said there should be no mining without science, oversight, and transparency: mining should not be permitted unless comprehensive mapping and landscape-level cumulative ecological and climate assessments establish carrying capacity, hydrological security, habitat resilience, and sustainable extraction thresholds, with periodic independent review of cumulative impacts. None of these definitions or recommendations was considered by the MoEF&CC in its final report.

The problem of districts

The committees and their definitions of the Aravallis are one part of the problem; agreeing on the number of districts in which the range exists is another. Ahluwalia said a significant reduction in the total number of Aravalli districts in the MoEF&CC report submitted to the Supreme Court in October 2025 was deeply concerning. The FSI report of September 22, 2025, identified 63 Aravalli districts; the MoEF&CC-led committee in its October 13, 2025 affidavit mentioned only 37, omitting prominent districts in Rajasthan such as Chittorgarh, Sawai Madhopur, Bharatpur, Karauli, and Bundi. Ahluwalia demanded that the Supreme Court and the newly appointed committee include in their study all 64 districts of the Aravalli range—the 63 identified by the FSI across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Delhi, and the additional district of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, where Govardhan Parvat, a sacred hill forming an outlying spur of the Aravalli range, is situated.

Origin of the current definition debate

According to the amicus curiae’s submission, the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a notification on May 7, 1992, recognising for the first time that the Aravalli hills required protection and conservation. In 2002, the Supreme Court for the first time recognised the Aravallis as a contiguous ecosystem and directed protection from mining in the “Aravalli hills”. In 2010, it was Rajasthan—in its application to the Supreme Court—that offered a restrictive definition: only “peaks/parts of hills that are 100 metres above the ground level are to be treated as ‘Aravalli Hills’”. The apex court then directed the FSI to carry out a survey using satellite imagery in tandem with the Central Empowered Committee and the Rajasthan government, ruling that the definition “shall not be confined to peaks/parts of hills above 100 metres from the ground level.”

An earlier FSI report, submitted in 2018, calculated 10,364.32 hectares of land being mined outside sanctioned mining lease areas. It found that in Alwar district, 31 out of 128 hills and hillocks examined had vanished. It was in 2024, when the apex court considered applications for mining leases, that the Rajasthan government raised the question of definition once again.

The Supreme Court accepted the MoEF&CC definition of the Aravallis for the purposes of mining, while directing the MoEF&CC to prepare a Management Plan for Sustainable Mining (MPSM) through the ICFRE for the entire Aravallis—on the lines of the MPSM for the Saranda forests in Jharkhand. The court held that the MPSM must identify permissible areas for mining, as well as ecologically sensitive, conservation-critical, and restoration-priority areas where mining shall be strictly prohibited or permitted only under exceptional and scientifically justified circumstances. It also directed that till the MPSM is finalised, no fresh mining leases ought to be granted.

Saranda not Aravallis

Ahluwalia, however, said the reliance on the Saranda Forest example in the Supreme Court order dated November 20, 2025, “is wholly misplaced and bears no factual or ecological similarity to the Aravalli region. The Saranda Forest matter pertained to the declaration of an area admeasuring approximately 314 square km as a wildlife sanctuary situated within a single district of Jharkhand. The Aravalli landscape, on the other hand, constitutes one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, extending over 1.44 lakh square km and spanning nearly 700 km over Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat.” In view of the vast geographical expanse, ecological diversity, and inter-state character of the Aravalli range, she said, the preparation of an MPSM based on the “Saranda model” is manifestly inadequate and incapable of addressing the range’s multifaceted environmental, hydrological, social, and livelihood concerns.

Rather than a Management Plan for Sustainable Mining, what is required, she argued, is effective legal and administrative action to protect and conserve the Aravallis on the lines of what was done for the Western Ghats.

The question of whether a definition is even necessary cuts to the heart of the matter. Some of the intervening applications filed before the Supreme Court by conservationist groups point out that the creation of a definition falls within the domain of the legislature, and that hills and mountains do not need to be defined. This view finds resonance in the 2013 High Level Working Group (HLWG) headed by K. Kasturirangan to look into the conservation of the Western Ghats: it was the categorical opinion of all geologists and geomorphologists consulted that it is not possible to define the Western Ghats and demarcate its boundaries geologically or geomorphologically. In the absence of such a definition, the HLWG used the talukas identified by the Planning Commission and the Hill Area Development Programme of the Government of India as the basis for protection, Ahluwalia pointed out.

As Ahluwalia pointed out, the HLWG’s focus was on protecting the Western Ghats ecosystem and declaring Ecologically Sensitive Areas to ensure long-term conservation—without any accepted definition of the range. This underscores the fact that a definition is not a precondition for conservation.

Hope may be on the horizon. After over a decade of delay and tussle with State governments, the Centre is moving to notify Ecologically Sensitive Areas in parts of the Western Ghats. The ESZs first proposed by the late Madhav Gadgil could still protect the remaining fragile ecosystems there. A similar notification could grant the Aravallis the legal protection they need—regulating mining and preventing further devastation of livelihoods and habitats.

Meena Menon, PhD, University of Leeds, is an independent journalist, researcher and author.

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