The Aravalli range, among the oldest surviving landforms on this planet, meanders through Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat. What is visible today is merely the weathered skeleton of a vast Proterozoic mountain system that emerged nearly 1.8 billion years ago. Over millennia, the range has been sculpted by natural forces; in recent decades, far more brutally, by human intervention. Mining, deforestation and unplanned development have stripped the hills of their ecological resilience and fragmented what was once an expansive, interconnected landscape.

The remnants now stand as the last living vestiges of a unique natural heritage. It is now shrunken, degraded and perilously close to disappearance. Strikingly, close to 90 per cent of the hill terrain is no longer officially recognised as part of the Aravallis, leaving a fragile ecosystem exposed to accelerated loss and erasure. This fear is grounded in the new scientific uniform definition of the Aravalli ecosystem, recognized by the Supreme Court, which redefines the Aravalli as any landform with an elevation of at least 100 metres above local relief. This redefinition, being proposed as a measure of standardisation, risks undermining India’s oldest geological heritage and one of its last ecological safeguards. There are arguments in favour of the standardisation of definitions of what constitutes the Aravalli, but nature has no advocate of its own.

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cannot plead its own case; this is why we must. The Aravalli landscape has drawn the Supreme Court’s attention multiple times, as illegal mining across its four states has forced repeated judicial intervention, particularly in Rajasthan. In 2018, the Supreme Court cited the Forest Survey of India’s finding that 31 of 128........

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