Authors: Dr. Kavita Assistant Professor (Law), TERI School of Advanced Studies and Aadarsh Anand (LLM Candidate), TERI School of Advanced Studies

By accepting the definitional framework of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate (MoEF&CC) Change through November 2025 judgement, the Supreme Court dealt with the ambiguity in a reductive manner  in the sense that context specific state classifications were collapsed into a single height based test. The standardisation of 100 metre threshold for hill classification was justified in the order on grounds of operational clarity. This means that any topography specified within Aravalli areas that is more than 100 metres is classified as protected terrain. The aim of the above was to eliminate the conflicting definitions that compromised mining regulation in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

The Shift Toward Centralization

The approval by Supreme Court of a Union-led definition in the Aravalli matter has centralised the regulatory base of mining in a domain that the Constitution deliberately distributes between Centre and the states. Entry 23 of List II permits states to legislate on mines and mineral development subject to provisions of List I. Entry 54 of List I grants Parliament the power to override this in the public interest. 

By deferring entirely to the MoEF&CC’s definition, the Court’s ruling displaces the sub-national regulatory regimes that had developed across the four states and in several cases these domestic state protections were more sensitive to the local geomorphological conditions than the uniform 100-metre standard.

The State-Level Impact

Before the 2025 decision, the different states had different policies that considered the different terrain and socio-economic needs of various regions:

Rajasthan: It is pertinent to note that the State is home to 80 percent of the range. PIB noted that the State had been following a committee report definition since 2006. The state’s classification system was developed from a 2002 Committee Report that applied the Richard Murphy landform classification framework, under which hills were defined as formations rising 100 metres above the surrounding relief of the surrounding area. The Aravalli hills were stated as formations that are 100 meters above the relief of the area and mining was not allowed on the hills and their slopes. Although the 2025 definition was similar, the approval stamp of this measure on a national scale essentially reduced the protection. It was approximated that 11,033 of the 12,081 mapped hills in Rajasthan would lose protection (based on terrain elevation data cited in The Leaflet’s analysis of the November 2025 judgement)  should this have been the only measure.

Haryana: Haryana relies on two distinct legal instruments to protect its rocky, uncultivable tracts. First, the Punjab Land Preservation Act, 1900 (PLPA) permits the State to designate areas for the prevention of soil erosion and protection of sub-soil water; in practice, such designations appear in revenue records as Gair Mumkin Pahad (uncultivable hilly land). The Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA), 1900 and Gair Mumkin Pahad under the 1992 notification has no single definition. According to Sections 4 and 5 of the PLPA, the state informs designated areas in order to contain soil erosion and preserve the sub-soil water. These are the lands that are registered in revenue books as Gair Mumkin Pahad (rocky land/hills that do not get any cultivation). This designation implied that low-lying ridges were designated a forest by the court order and no non-forest activities such as mining and real estate could be conducted in such areas. The 100-meter rule would make these local categories legally inoperative in respect of low-lying ridges that fall below the threshold, thereby exposing significant portions of the National Capital Region to unregulated real estate development and mining activity, and placing under threat the groundwater recharge zones upon which the NCR’s peri-urban ecology depends..

Delhi: The Morphological Ridge in Delhi is regulated by Delhi Master Plan. Although the notified Ridge is formally a forest, the Morphological Ridge covers the regions which have geomorphology of a ridge, but which are not notified. This categorization implied that any construction work in such ridge-like regions was to be given a special clearance by the Ridge Management Board. By applying a centralised height measure, areas that fall below the 100-metre threshold but perform critical ecological functions including air filtration, urban heat mitigation, stormwater management, and groundwater recharge would be stripped of the regulatory protection previously afforded by the Ridge Management Board’s oversight of the Morphological Ridge. 

Gujarat: The new rule of height may leave 82% of the existing Aravalli coverage in Gujarat and Haryana are risking denotification. This risk arises because the Gujarat classification, determined by the 1992 notification, was based on terrain and land type rather than elevation, and covered three distinct revenue-land categories: Gair Mumkin Pahad (uncultivable hilly land), Banjan Beed (uncultivable common land used for grazing or scrub vegetation), and Rundh (forested or otherwise protected land under customary or statutory conservation).   This categorisation ensured that even the hillocks that were low in altitude were covered to preserve the sources of the rivers. 

The diversity of state-level frameworks documented above is not legislative inconsistency. It is the expression of a constitutional design that assumes collaboration rather than control. India’s federal scheme distributes regulatory authority over mines and mineral development across List I and List II of the Seventh Schedule precisely to allow for context-sensitive governance, responsive to local terrain, hydrology, and land-use patterns. The November 2025 judgement, by endorsing a single Union-led metric, disrupted this structure. The following section examines how.

Undermining Ecological Federalism

To begin with, there was no meaningful state representation in the process of making decisions. As the states were consulted by the MoEF&CC committee, the final definitional power was centralized in the Union government and determined by the Supreme Court. More importantly, the amicus curiae were more influential than state counsels in terms of influencing the judgment. 

The 20.11.2025 order has categorically noted that:

“ 14. … The learned Amicus had therefore suggested that it will be appropriate if all the issues with regard to the Aravali Hills and Ranges be examined by the Central Empowered Committee5 and directions be issued by this Court in that regard.

…

22. It will be relevant to refer to the entire order passed by this Court on 9th May 2024, which reads thus:

…

9. In the meantime, we also issue the following directions, as suggested by Shri P. Parameshwar, learned Amicus Curiae, to which Shri Tushar Mehta, learned Solicitor General of India appearing for the State of Haryana and Shri K.M. Natraj, learned Additional Solicitor General of India appearing for the State of Rajasthan, do not have any objection

27. The learned Amicus submitted that the Forest Survey of India,7 vide its Status Report dated 19th August 2010 in pursuance to the order of this Court dated 19th February 2010 in the present proceedings, has defined the Aravalis as under:

“(i) slope >3°, (ii) foothill buffer = 100m, (iii) inter hill distance or valley width= 500m and (iv) the area enclosed by above defined hills from all sides.”

28. The learned Amicus submitted that the FSI is an expert body in the field and there should have been no reason for the Committee to not accept the definition as proposed by the FSI and substitute it with another definition.

29. The learned Amicus placed before this Court the report of the Committee and how the Aravali Hills and Ranges have been sought to be defined for the purposes of mining. 

…

30. The learned Amicus submitted that if the definition as recommended by the Committee is accepted, all the hills below the height of 100 metres would be opened up for mining and as a result the Aravali Hills and Ranges would lose their continuity and integrity. He, therefore, submitted that if the definition as suggested by the Committee is accepted, it would totally endanger the environment and ecology of the mountains.”

This structural imbalance challenges federalism. For instance, States whose territory, resources, and reinforcement duties are on the table did not equally engage in the process of definition making.

Secondly, the decision superseded state knowledge and case law. Rajasthan used its 2002 definition in an administrative context over 20 years since 09.01.2006. However, this was not overruled by any technical reason but overridden by centralised reinterpretation. The multi layered classification in Haryana which was based upon local hydrological, geological and revenue administrative circumstances has now become subordinated to a national template. The ecological governance cannot be converted into similar measures that are not tied to the regional context.

Thirdly, from the November 2025 judgement it can be interpreted that without Supreme Court intervention, the states can no longer tune the definitions to capture the developed knowledge on science or local circumstances. This goes directly against the principles of federalism. An outcome can be that rather than making states environmental governance laboratories States become units of administration implementing centralized directives.

The Judicial Pivot and the Path to Cooperation

Pertinent to note that a day after MoEFCC proposed the new definition, the Central Empowered Committee had informed the amicus that it neither approved or examined the MoEFCC proposal. However, the 20.11.2025 judgement embraced the definition by MoEFCC. Even actions of the Supreme Court indicate that it is reconsidering the course taken by Centre instead of considering it final. Reacting to outcry and emerging facts, a three judge bench suspended the 100m rule vide order dated 29.12.2025. This self-correction is an acknowledgement that environmental protection cannot be brought to purely technical or metric operations. That is, the reason why Aravalli should be preserved should be rooted in the environmental ethos of the Constitution through Articles 48A, 51A(g) and 21 as opposed to a simple height limit.

Sustainable protection will need Centre State cooperation embedded in institutional design. The policy of Aravalli needs to be managed by an institution analogous to National Board for Wildlife (NBWL), maybe Aravalli Regulatory Council (ARC) which statutorily includes 15 State government members. Just like NBWL, the ARC would ensure that sub-national ecological knowledge and administrative capacity are embedded in decision-making rather than being merely advisory inputs. An Aravalli-specific body with mandatory state representation would structurally prevent a repeat of the definitional exclusion that characterised the November 2025 process. 

A path can be drawn up through Constitution of India. It can be utilised to use create an Inter-State Council to build a technical and political consensus under Article 263 and to secure sustainable agreement amongst Aravalli States and the Centre. Pursuant to this, Article 252 can be utilised then to convert that consensus into a binding statutory regime. It must be acknowledged, however, that Article 263 requires Presidential initiative, and the Inter-State Council has historically been underutilised as an instrument of cooperative federalism. To address this, the states and civil society organisations could jointly petition the President through formal representations; alternatively, given that the Supreme Court remains seized of the Aravalli matter, parties before it could include a prayer requesting the Court to recommend the convening of the Inter-State Council as part of a durable long-term framework, thus using the Court’s own authority to catalyse a cooperative mechanism rather than merely issuing a top-down metric.

At any rate the States ought to be the first on the ground. They are acquainted with the surface, and planning and delimiting and conservation schemes in the locality ought to be left to the State governments. The Union must be supportive, by provision of scientific, technical and enforcement support. 

The stay issued on 29 December 2025 is not a solution in itself but is an acknowledgement previous approach was constitutionally and ecologically insufficient. The article has advanced two analytically distinct critiques that each require a distinct remedy. The first is the metric uniformity critique: a single height threshold cannot capture the ecological diversity of a range that spans four states with fundamentally different terrain, hydrology, and land-use histories. The second is the federal bypass critique: the definitional power was exercised without meaningful state participation, displacing over two decades of sub-national regulatory development without technical justification. A lasting remedy must address both. A constitutionally sound and ecologically effective Aravalli protection regime would rest on a multi-criteria ecological classification developed through a participatory inter-state process, with mandatory state representation in any body that holds definitional authority.