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Bengaluru: “The Aravallis is safe.”

“The government has not relaxed any rule about the Aravallis.”

“The Aravallis will remain protected, this is also the prime minister’s resolve.”

These are some of the many statements made by Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav over the last week about the government’s new definition for the Aravallis – which has whipped up quite a storm.

The new definition – which says that only hills above a local relief level of 100 metres in height will qualify as the Aravallis, according to a Supreme Court order – means that a large part of the Aravallis will be opened up for commercial activities such as mining, environmentalists have alleged.

But the new definition will not endanger the Aravalli hill range – only protect it, the minister has claimed several times over the past week. Any report that suggests otherwise is “misinformation”, he said.

Several BJP social media accounts too have entered the fray, reiterating this. Meanwhile, members of opposition parties have refused to accept these claims and countered them.

But why this sudden burst of clarifications by the minister, and via government media bureaus and BJP party handles on social media – when the Supreme Court’s order accepting the definition came on November 20, about a month ago? Huge protests in Rajasthan, and opposition parties lending support to the cause, may hold the answer.

Environmental policy researchers told The Wire that the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the uniform definition for the Aravallis is a “disappointment”, and shows how the court is increasingly siding with corporate interests.

They added that if what minister Yadav now claims is true – that the new definition will mean that only 0.19% of the Aravallis may be opened up for mining – he should come on record about how many hills comprise the Aravallis, and how many will cease to be part of it if the new definition is implemented.

That is also one of the demands that environmentalists as part of a citizen collective, the Aravalli Virasat Jan Abhiyaan, have made of Yadav on December 22.

On November 20, the Supreme Court accepted the Union environment ministry’s recommendation for a new, uniform definition of the Aravallis.

Per this definition as specified in the Supreme Court order, a landform will be considered part of the Aravalli Range only if it is at least 100 metres higher than the local relief (including the landform’s slopes and adjacent areas), as The Wire pointed out in its story dated December 7. In geology, local relief is the difference between the highest point and the lowest point in a small area.

Only if two hills are within 500 metres of each other will the area between the two be considered as part of the Aravalli Hills too.

This definition of the Aravalli Hills and Ranges “in the context of mining” was proposed by a committee constituted by the Supreme Court in 2024.

Incidentally, this committee contained only officials from departments under the Union government. The joint secretary of the Union environment ministry was the convenor of the committee; other members were the secretary of the same ministry, the secretaries of all four states which the Aravalli Range spans, and one representative each from the Geological Survey of India (which comes under the Ministry of Mines), and the Central Empowered Committee and the Forest Survey of India (FSI) – both of which come under the Union environment ministry.

The Aravallis span a total of 34 districts according to the Union environment ministry. In this satellite image of a section of the range courtesy NASA, Jaipur is seen in the bottom left and Alwar in the top right.

“Bureaucrats cannot be experts,” environmental policy researcher Debadityo Sinha told The Wire on December 23. “The committee needed credible experts but there were none. No independent scientist, or even a scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India, or a social scientist was part of it.”

Moreover, using a 100 metre-cut off based on the average elevation of a district is problematic, Sinha pointed out. The Committee’s report as filed in the ministry’s affidavit shows that it used an arithmetic mean to justify an arbitrary 100-metre baseline, he said.

“For a statistical analysis of a dataset with such high variance, the ‘average’ is a misleading metric here … There should have been a serious deliberation on using more representative metrics, such as the median or the full elevation range, rather than a simplistic average that distorts the physical reality,” Sinha, an ecologist by training, noted.

A report by the Indian Express on November 27 had said that as per internal documents of the FSI, only 1,048 of 12,081 Aravalli Hills that are 20 metres or higher and spread across 15 districts in Rajasthan, are 100 metres or more in height. This means that just about 8.7% of the Aravallis in Rajasthan (which has the highest area under the Aravallis across all states) will be protected by the new definition, the report said.

The news report also quoted an official of the Union environment ministry as saying that the FSI had cautioned that the 100 metre cut-off “would protect only a few guard posts while surrendering the fences below”. The FSI itself uses a definition for the Aravallis that does not rely on local relief, per the Supreme Court order.

Incidentally, the amicus curiae (an advocate appointed by........

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