Are Legal Definitions Erasing India's Natural Heritage? The Aravali Hills Case and Beyond

Srimathi VenkatachariEnvironmental 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 Aravali hills for mining regulation illustrates this phenomenon with unusual clarity. By prescribing a minimum ‘local relief’ threshold, the SC 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 excluded. After public outcry, the court has now agreed to a relook of its order.TN has experienced comparable outcomes, achieved through classificatory practices that produce the same constitutional result.The Aravali range is among the oldest geological formations on the planet. Its ecological significance lies not in height, but in function — groundwater recharge, climate moderation, 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 Aravalis. Such formations are not destroyed; their protection is withdrawn.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 that uncertainty must operate in favour of environmental protection. From Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum (that highlighted pollution by tanneries) to Godavarman (for safeguarding forests), courts have privileged ecological function over administrative convenience.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 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 TN’s treatment of lakes and tanks that are often protected only if notified or correctly classified in revenue records. Non-notified water bodies, regardless of hydrological function are treated as available land. 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. 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 Madras high court in cases concerning water bodies and environmental degradation, applies with equal force to hills, hill ranges and ancient geological systems. The most unsettling feature of these developments is their quietness. The land remains visibly intact. Only the law has turned away.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. There is a certain tragic symmetry in the fact that the Madurai bench of Madras HC, 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, 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.(The writer is an advocate in Madras high court)