Issues - Ecology

Shailendra Boora SJ

The Aravallis and the Politics of Measurement

The Aravalli hill system is at the centre of an important debate in India’s environmental governance. This hill range is one of the subcontinent’s oldest geological formations, yet it is increasingly treated less as a living landscape and more as a contested category shaped by mining, real-estate expansion, and a patchwork of regulatory authority across States. The present dispute is therefore not only about “saving the Aravallis”. It is also about how a definitional choice in one landscape can ripple into governance norms for other ecologically sensitive zones.