The Aravalli hills in northwestern India that traverses about 700 km across four states, including as an environmental bulwark to capital Delhi, did not deteriorate due to pressure, age, or climate. It existed in one of the hardest ecological areas of the subcontinent for generations, enduring geological upheavals, desert winds, unpredictable monsoons, and human occupation. The hills endured borders being redrawn, economies changing, and empires rising and falling. 

And yet, one of the greatest dangers the range is facing is paperwork. Not in a symbolic or figurative sense, but literally. The legal presence of living landscapes is being stripped away through the use of files, committees, definitions, notifications, and technical jargon. Environmental policy is not failing in this case; environmental devastation is being meticulously planned and justified by environmental policies.

The Aravalli range was recently redefined using strict, height-based criteria, which are being portrayed as administrative accuracy and scientific clarity. In reality, it is a bureaucratic convenience. By reducing the significance of the range, the state is trying to minimise its obligations to protect the same. Scrub forests, low-lying hills, rocky ridges, seasonal water-holding landforms, and delicate ecological buffers are discreetly left out not because their inclusion would hamper extraction rather because they have less ecological significance. Ecology cannot function in an isolated manner; rather it operates in a continuous system. 

However, the paperwork is designed selectively. The designed paperwork aimed to exclude anything that cannot be measured. As a result, the hills remain on the ground, visible to those who live around, but they disappear in law. This disappearance is purposeful.

The paperwork asserts its neutrality. The Files assert their objectivity. Committees assert their knowledge. Collectively, they assert innocence. And that's how the environmental destruction is delivered in a clean, lawful, and methodical manner. No forest is publicly denounced. There isn't a hill specifically designated for death. Rather, protection is lowered to the bare minimum. Everything that does not have that meaning is just left behind. This type of governance pretends to just define to avoid accountability. Abandonment becomes policy once protection is presented as a technical category rather than a moral duty. What comes next is foreseeable. Profit becomes available as land becomes available. Infrastructure initiatives, real estate plans, and mining leases all fill in the blanks left by definitions. In this way, paperwork does not loudly authorize destruction. It normalizes it, quietly.

Hollowing The Aravallis

Rajasthan has experienced the effects of such a mechanism in the past, therefore it is aware of it. Long before this, the Aravallis were hollowed down by officially sanctioned mining. Aquifers were drained, hillsides were unstable, and vegetation was removed via environmental clearances. Files were stamped, permissions were given, and protocols were adhered to. The documentation was perfect and the results were disastrous. The water tables fell. The wells dried. The agricultural sector declined. Storms of dust become more intense. Heat solidified. There was an increase in migration. Entire areas become less livable and more brittle. The files that allowed the damage did not contain any of this. The files made it through. The land did not. The local outrage over the Aravallis today is not driven by any ideological inclination, but a strong collective memory trying to prevent historical recurrence.

Environmental consciousness came very naturally to the people of Rajasthan. It emerged from a survival strategy of scarcity. Water systems like baoris, johads, and tankas were not any policy formulated by modern-day governments but community-driven approaches towards the local ecological limits and some of the structures date back to the Indus Valley Civilisation. Sacred groves and protected commons were not romantic traditions, they were designed even before the advent of agrarian-hunter-gatherer societies for practical purposes. The earliest documentation of such systems can be found in the writing of German forester Dietrich Brandis, noting their presence in the Aravalli hills as early as 1887, describing them in areas like Rajputana and Mewar, where communities strictly prohibited logging except for dead wood used in religious or funerary purposes. Communities like the Bishnois, Gurjars, and various tribal groups have played a key role in their preservation. People in this state, especially in rural areas where people are much more dependent on nature, learned early that overuse of scarce resources can bring collapse. Thus resilience towards any policies that can endanger the environment has become a tool of protection. People resisted every time the law advocated for natural extraction and did not align with the survival of locals. The recent protest shown by the people shows the distance between the legal framework and ecological truth. It demonstrates that legality is not equal to legitimacy when life is at stake.

Destroying Full Ecosystem

What makes the present scenario more dangerous is the way the technical language is being presented as camouflage. In the paperwork, classifications, redefinitions, and height criteria are presented as objective facts and as inevitable outcomes of science; they're not. They are decisions made politically. Every definition has both inclusions and exclusions. Priority is reflected in every exclusion. Choosing a minimum definition over holistic protection indicates the lurking mindsets of the bourgeois behind the veil of paperwork. This is not ignorance of the disastrous consequences. It is the acceptance of them. The violence here is not dramatic; it is administrative.

Development offered as a justification is a broken argument that refuses to learn from the past. Development that dismantles the ecological scenario is not true progress; it just delays degradation. The hills were not empty land waiting to be used, they were functional ecosystems, storing water, slowing desertification, regulating microclimates, anchoring soil, and protecting air quality across large regions. Destroying such a full ecosystem is only likely to bring short-term economic growth and long-term environmental calamities. Paperwork is more prone to registering the short-term revenue collection than the long-term damage.

Hills Might Collapse

What is being done to the Aravallis displays much more than deforestation that extends far beyond Rajasthan and northwestern India. If hills can be eroded through redefinition, forests can be fragmented through classification, water bodies can be diminished through measurement, then survival can be denied through legality. The states are acting like it is trusting paperwork more than the ecosystem and reality. And if this continues, it is going to cross the borders soon and will prove the scarcity of value in the hierarchy of governance. 

Being the oldest range in the country, the Aravalli survived because it did not compromise with convenience. And now if governance chose to focus on the convenience of its own, then the hills might collapse as a result of ill-motivated approvals and justifications. As a result, the paperwork would be kept safe and the committee will proceed with some other hills.

(The author is an assistant faculty member, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi specialising in policy studies of the region. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at rajarshi.education@gmail.com )