When mountains are treated as empty land
By Anusuya Baruah
It is disheartening that the people living in modern-day India have to constantly voice their concerns just to stop the elimination of the forests, hills, and mountain systems. Discussions centred around the Aravalli range is not a single instance of the environment being ignored; rather they point to a more profound and widespread lack of understanding about the whole process of envisioning, planning, and implementing what is called ‘development’ in the country. The ancient Aravallis in the western part of India and the delicate hill systems in Northeast India are getting more and more perceived as the unoccupied land that is just waiting for ‘productive’ use rather than as the intricate ecological structures that are vital to environmental stability and human life.
The Aravalli range, among the oldest mountain systems in the world, functions as a vital ecological barrier against desertification, a critical groundwater recharge zone, and a regulator of regional climate. Its degradation has already contributed to declining water tables, rising temperatures, and expanding aridity in adjoining regions. Yet, despite decades of scientific warnings, mining, construction, and real estate expansion continue to hollow out the range in the name of economic growth. What is particularly alarming is that such destruction is routinely justified as development, even when it undermines the very environmental foundations upon which human habitation depends.
This kind of situation is not restricted only to the northwestern part of India. The same is true for north-eastern India where hill systems are performing equally important if not more complex ecological functions. The hills of Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Arunachal Pradesh are acting as natural barriers providing protection from floods, landslides, and soil erosion, besides being the ones sustaining the very delicate river systems that nourish the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys. It is still the same story with large-scale hill cutting; unregulated mining, aggressive road construction, and poorly planned urban expansion steadily destabilizing fragile landscapes. The similarity between the Aravallis and the Northeast hills lies not merely in ecological vulnerability, but in the underlying mindset that governs policy decisions. Both regions are subjected to a model of development that is profoundly disconnected from geography. Mountains are viewed as obstacles to connectivity, forests as impediments to growth, and rivers as engineering problems to be controlled. Such thinking reflects not progress, but ecological illiteracy—an inability or unwillingness to understand the basic principles of physiography, hydrology, and environmental balance.
In the Northeast, the impact of this disconnect is very clear. The occurrence of landslides in the region has shifted from being rare to becoming common. Floods in Assam, though periodically affected by the factors mentioned, are likened to the worst emergencies called natural disasters. Cities like Shillong, Aizawl, and Kohima are suffering from acute water shortages and unstable slopes; the reasons being improper handling of the hillside and environment, and lack of regulation in the latter. Unlike in the case of the Aravallis, such crises are not even seen as failures of policy and they are not at all recognized as the trade-offs of development that are to be borne. The fact that both regions have such a negative image and yet they are both intact in terms of having traditional practices of ecological restraint which have been there for a long time makes the situation even more troubling. In the Aravalli region, mountain ecology would always have a place in pastoral and agrarian practices, functionally coexisting with them. In the Northeast, the native people would develop their land with sustainable practices and have their land even governed through formal law, customary law, ritual sanction, and eco-knowledge. The mountains, the trees, and the water were not just resources; they were parts of the moral and cultural paradigms that restricted their exploitation. The reduction of such frameworks started with the colonial era and continued through the other phases.
The necessity for citizens to come together to demand the safeguarding of mountains and forests indicates a critical democratic failure. Environmental precautions should, in fact, be set beforehand and not be aftermath. However, when the public protest becomes the only means of ecological preservation, it indicates that the regulatory bodies have relinquished their duty. The same holds for mining sanctions in the Aravallis and infrastructural projects in the Northeast hills. The issue of education is equally significant. The issue is not a lack of data—India has no shortage of environmental reports—but a systemic disregard for ecological knowledge in governance. Development divorced from geography is not development; it is deferred disaster.
Protecting mountain systems is not a sentimental or optional exercise. It is central to climate resilience, water security, and long-term economic stability. Short-term gains extracted from fragile landscapes will inevitably be outweighed by the costs of disaster mitigation, displacement, and ecological repair. Until geography is restored to the centre of policy-making, the Aravallis will continue to crumble—and the hills of the Northeast will follow the same perilous path.
The writer is a Phd scholar, Cotton University, Guwahati-Assam: Email: [email protected]
