Saving the Aravallis: Political and bureaucratic buy-in is critical

Given the scale of destruction of the Aravallis, one of India’s oldest mountain ranges, the launch of the Aravalli Green Wall project on June 5, World Environment Day, has not come a day too soon. Inspired by Africa’s Great Green Wall project to regreen the Sahel, the Indian version aims to reforest 700 km of the range in 29 districts in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. The broad plan is to supplant destructive alien species with native species on scrubland, wasteland and degraded forest and restore water bodies to create an additional 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon sink, as India has committed as its Nationally Determined Contributions under the United Nations’ Paris climate change agreement.  The notable point about this project, initially announced in 2019, is that the government plans to work with stakeholders — state governments, civil society organisations. and private sector and local communities in pasture development and agroforestry.  The Aravalli Green Wall project is ambitious and long overdue, given the dangers of creeping desertification from the Thar Desert and the dangerously depleted water table.   

Though the project ticks all the boxes in terms of intention, it starts with the handicap of facing a landscape, a recognised biodiversity hotspot, which is losing its natural wealth to unchecked ecological exploitation. Almost a decade ago, the Indian Space Research Organisation, based on satellite data, had raised the red flag on the degradation of the Aravallis. Today, over a quarter of the range is degraded, thanks to unchecked mining, deforestation, and encroachment. Whole hillsides have been obliterated by illegal miners extracting stone to meet the construction industry’s insatiable demands. Many rivers in north Rajasthan have dried up as a result of excessive mining. The knock-on impact of this is devastating.  In 2023, the Central Ground Water Board said groundwater levels in Haryana and Rajasthan were depleting by 1 to 1.5 metres annually, a disaster for farming, livestock, and peoples’ access to drinking water. 

It is worth noting that the bulk of the degradation of the Aravallis is the result of plain illegal activities, costing state governments crores of rupees in revenue. Checking such large-scale transgressions, conducted openly and with impunity, suggests that the success of the Aravalli Green Wall project must be preceded by the hard institutional work of breaking longstanding collusion between the state officialdom and private entrepreneurs and promoting robust inter-state institutional mechanisms to ensure effective monitoring and deterrence. For the project to be sustainable, political and bureaucratic buy-in is, therefore, critical so that the initiative transcends political change. The rapidly deteriorating ecology of the Western Ghats offers a cautionary tale in the dangers of inadequate recognition from state political regimes. Ravaged by climate change, this fragile biodiversity hotspot has been the focus of two reports recommending banning, to varying degrees, mining, quarrying, and thermal power plants in designated ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs). Yet, assessments of landslides in Wayanad, Kerala, in July last year, killing over 250 people, are instructive. Satellite imagery reveals that the area has 48 stone quarries, 15 of them located in ESAs.  The Aravalli Green Wall is an opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes.