Stakeholders to determine what constitutes Aravalis

NEW DELHI: When a government wants to know what constitutes a mountain range, then environmentalists are certain to have their antennae up. And this is precisely what has happened after a meeting of the National Capital Region Planning Board decided that "stakeholders" would take up the exercise of demarcating or determining what exactly constituted the Aravalis.

The stakeholders in this case are the environment ministry, ministry of urban development and Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan states.

The definition they come up with will apply uniformly to all NCR states, officials said.

"The stakeholders will determine what constitutes the Aravali range so that there is uniformity in planning," said a senior bureaucrat who attended the meeting.

Haryana had recently ordered the notification of about 1,600 acres of forests in and around Mangar Bani as a no-construction zone.

This has been welcomed by activists, but now the larger issue of saving the Aravallis is bothering them.

"We knew that the government was in denial about what constituted a forest, but now they also seem to be confused about what the Aravalis are? What next?" asked Lt Col Sarvadaman Singh Oberoi (retd), an eco-activist.

Others said it was "bizarre" that the Haryana government wasn't clear about the country's oldest plateau mountain range stretching across 700 km.


They claimed this was only a tactic to delay the demarcation of natural conservation zones and to reduce the area falling under such zones in order to open up the land for construction.

Currently, the regional plan limits construction in these zones 0.5% of the area.

"There is no delineation for the Himalayas or for the Ganga.

How will the government's determination of the Aravalis be different from what is already on the maps? How can forest officers and a handful of bureaucrats determine what are the Aravalis?" asked a bemused forest official.

Eco activists pointed that Haryana had already left out large tracts of the elevated range from natural conservation zones in the draft regional plan.

Around 12,000 hectares of eco-sensitive Aravali areas have not been recognised as qualifying for such zones, they allege. "Haryana has the second-lowest forest cover in the country at 3.6%, a ninth of the National Forest Policy target. Given this situation, including the Aravalis in conservation zones or as forests was the bare minimum required to maintain the state's forest cover," opined Chetan Agarwal, an environmental analyst.