Making Molehills of Mountains: The Aravalli Lesson Environmental destruction is commonly imagined as sudden and visible -trees felled, hills quarried, rivers poisoned. Yet in India, some of the most consequential ecological losses occur quietly, through administrative acts rather than physical violence. Landscapes are not always destroyed; they are frequently redefined out of legal protection.

Making Molehills of Mountains: The Aravalli Lesson
Environmental destruction is commonly imagined as sudden and visible -trees felled, hills quarried, rivers poisoned. Yet in India, some of the most consequential ecological losses occur quietly, through administrative acts rather than physical violence. Landscapes are not always destroyed; they are frequently redefined out of legal protection.
The Supreme Court’s acceptance of a height-based definition of the Aravalli hills for mining regulation illustrates this phenomenon with unusual clarity. By prescribing a minimum “local relief” threshold, the Court sought administrative certainty. The effect, however, is the creation of a category of ecological loss in which land continues to exist physically, but ceases to exist legally. Hills that fall short of a prescribed measurement are not harmed; they are simply excluded.
This development is not anomalous. Tamil Nadu has long experienced comparable outcomes, achieved not through numerical thresholds, but through classificatory practices that produce the same constitutional result.
The Aravalli Question: When Measurement Determines Meaning
The Aravalli range is among the oldest geological formations on the planet. Its ecological significance lies not in height, but in function – groundwater recharge, climate moderation, prevention of desertification, and ecological continuity across north-western India. These functions do not correlate neatly with elevation.
A height-based definition risks excluding formations integral to the ecological system of the Aravallis. Such formations are not destroyed; their protection is withdrawn. This marks a subtle but important jurisprudential shift. Indian environmental law has historically resisted mechanical thresholds, emphasising the precautionary principle and the doctrine that uncertainty must operate in favour of environmental protection. From Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum to Godavarman, courts have privileged ecological function over administrative convenience.
The Aravalli definition signals a departure. Protection is no longer presumed; it must be earned through measurement. That shift carries implications extend0ing well beyond Rajasthan and Haryana.
Tamil Nadu’s Parallel: Classification Without Numbers
Closer home, Tamil Nadu does not apply a formal height threshold to hills. Instead, it relies on administrative and revenue classifications that achieve a functionally similar outcome.
Across districts, rocky elevations forming part of the Eastern Ghats are routinely described as “minor hillocks” or “patta lands with stone.” Once so labelled, they fall outside the legal imagination of hill protection, even when they form part of continuous hill systems, act as water catchments, or lie contiguous to forest land. The physical feature remains; its ecological role persists. What disappears is legal concern.
The Eastern Ghats themselves illustrate the consequences of this approach. Unlike the Western Ghats, they lack a unified statutory or institutional identity. They are fragmented into survey numbers, villages, and project files. Each quarry clearance or land conversion appears individually insignificant. Cumulatively, the ecological continuum is eroded. This is not conservation by management, but attrition by fragmentation.
A similar pattern is evident in Tamil Nadu’s treatment of water bodies. Lakes and tanks are often protected only if formally notified or correctly classified in revenue records. Non-notified water bodies , regardless of hydrological function are treated as available land. The Madras High Court has repeatedly intervened to affirm that ecological character cannot be defeated by nomenclature. Yet the persistence of such litigation reveals a systemic preference for classification over function.
Constitutional Dimensions: Article 21 and Intergenerational Trust
Article 21 of the Constitution has been consistently interpreted to include environmental protection as an element of the right to life. Embedded within this interpretation is a principle of intergenerational equity: the present generation holds natural resources in trust for those yet to come.
When environmental protection is made contingent upon qualifying criteria – height, notification, or classification the temporal dimension of Article 21 is diminished. Expert committees and administrative thresholds are not inherently illegitimate. However, when courts adopt them without rigorous scrutiny of ecological consequences, judicial deference risks becoming constitutional abdication.
Public trust obligations cannot be defeated by administrative convenience. This principle, articulated repeatedly by the Madras High Court in cases concerning water bodies and environmental degradation, applies with equal force to hills, hill ranges, and ancient geological systems.
Loss Without Violence
The most unsettling feature of these developments is their quietness. There is no spectacle of destruction, no dramatic confrontation. The land remains visibly intact. Only the law has turned away.
This is environmental loss without violence- achieved not through machines, but through measurement; not through destruction, but through definition. It is a mode of loss that is harder to contest precisely because it appears orderly, technical, and rational.
Environmental law does not advance merely by regulating harm. It advances by recognising value. When recognition itself becomes conditional, protection becomes precarious.
From the Aravallis to the Eastern Ghats, India is witnessing a jurisprudential drift in which landscapes must qualify to be saved. Ecological function, historical endurance, and continuity are weighed against thresholds, classifications, and administrative descriptors and often found wanting.
The danger lies not only in what is lost, but in how it is lost. Ancient landscapes rarely vanish by violence. They are more often erased when the law, forgetting its trust to future generations under Article 21, measures endurance in metres, notifications, or labels and, in that quiet arithmetic, finds it wanting.
The Arithmetic of Disappearance
There is a certain tragic symmetry in the fact that the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, an institution that has repeatedly held that water bodies do not lose their ecological character by changes in nomenclature, stands upon land once recorded as a lake. The court enforces the public trust doctrine from terrain where that trust was, at some earlier point, administratively reclassified.
The irony is not incidental; it is instructive. It demonstrates how nature is seldom defeated by denial, but frequently by description. A lake becomes “poramboke land.” A hill becomes a “minor hillock.” A range becomes a collection of survey numbers. Nothing is destroyed. Everything is renamed.
When courts accept such classificatory logics, whether through height thresholds, revenue labels, or notification regimes, they risk participating in the same quiet erasure they are otherwise called upon to restrain. Article 21, which carries within it a duty to future generations, does not permit nature to survive only if it satisfies a metric, fits a file, or clears a definitional bar.
Ancient landscapes rarely vanish by violence. They are more often lost when the law, confident in its categories and secure in its constructions, concludes- politely, administratively, and with reasons recorded – that they are no longer visible enough to matter. Nature in India does not vanish – it fails a test and is quietly written off.