The hills perform services that never appear on any balance sheet. They blunt desert winds, hold back fine dust, allow rainwater to seep underground instead of rushing away as floods, and release heat at night, offering the region what little relief it gets from brutal summers. None of this enters the calculations of those trained to see only stone to sell and land to develop.
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Originally published in The Sunday Guardian on 28 dec '25
Which disease should the hills choose: the quarry or the resort? The question is like asking a patient whether he prefers death by bleeding or by suffocation. The physician would say: choose health. Yet health, the state of mountains being left as mountains, does not occur to a mind that recognises value only when something can be extracted or sold. We have forgotten that leaving something alone can be the wisest action of all.
Recently, the Supreme Court accepted a definition that treats the Aravalli Hills as landforms in Aravalli districts that rise 100 metres or more above local relief, with that relief measured through contour based mapping around the landform. On paper, it sounds like a technical clarification. In practice, it risks turning protection into a threshold game, because what does not cross the trigger can begin to look, on records, like it does not exist. A geological fact, a 670-kilometre spine of ancient rock running from Gujarat to Delhi, is thus pushed towards selective recognition by administrative measurement. The mountain did not shrink; only its protection did.
