In December 2025, the Supreme Court of India, acting on recommendations from expert bodies including the Union Ministry of Environment, the Forest Survey of India, and the Geological Survey of India, redefined the criteria for what constitutes a “mountain.” What might appear as a minor technical adjustment is, in fact, a paradigmatic shift. Moving away from earlier ecological understandings — based on slope, continuity, and vegetative cover — the Court adopted a narrowly physical measure focused solely on elevation and spatial proximity. Under this logic, any landform with less than 100 metres of local relief, or located more than 500 metres from adjacent peaks, is no longer considered a mountain or part of a mountain range.
Caught in this definitional shift is one of the oldest geological formations on Earth — the Aravalli range. This billion-year-old fold mountain system predates even the Himalayas. For millennia, it has shaped monsoon trajectories, nourished groundwater tables, moderated desertification, and provided a vital refuge for biodiversity. But today, it finds itself excluded — not because it has eroded or collapsed, but because it no longer conforms to the state’s developmental lexicon.
This is not erosion by wind or time — it is erasure by bureaucratic language. The Aravalli’s disqualification marks a troubling shift from ecological to technocratic reasoning. The mountain hasn’t changed in being, but in our willingness to see and recognise it. What remains is a terrain still alive — ecologically functioning, historically layered — but rendered invisible through policy. It is a mountain unmourned, because it has been unacknowledged into disappearance.
To understand how such a quiet vanishing becomes possible, we must look beyond the language of terrain and turn to the ideological logic that makes such redefinition acceptable. The disappearance of the Aravalli is not accidental. It reflects a deeper condition within the developmental imagination — one that values landscapes based on usefulness, visibility, and scale. In this framework, mountains must rise steeply, forests must be dense, and rivers must flow visibly and continuously. Anything that is residual, slow, or shaped by deep time becomes suspect.
The Aravalli, with its low elevations and scattered topography, does not conform. It does not perform for tourism. It does not easily fit the aesthetic of grandeur that can be marketed or consumed. It cannot be turned into spectacle. Therefore, it becomes invisible — not because it no longer exists, but because it ceases to serve developmental utility.
This is the violence of categorisation. What we call a mountain is not just a neutral description; it is a form of recognition. When policy redefines mountains in narrow administrative terms, everything outside those terms becomes discardable. This is how wetlands are marked as “vacant land,” rivers are renamed “drains,” forests reclassified as “non-forest use.” Now, even a billion-year-old mountain can be unmade through linguistic erasure.
Much like older people who are no longer seen as economically productive, the Aravalli is pushed aside — its age and erosion mistaken for irrelevance. But this neglect has consequences. As our society suffers from the declining wellbeing of its elderly, the ecological neglect of residual mountains compromises planetary wellbeing. The Aravalli is not obsolete; it is essential. Its marginalisation reveals how deeply we have severed our imagination from both ecological time and ethical recognition.
What makes the Aravalli’s disappearance especially troubling is its sheer banality. There are no bulldozers, no urgent media alerts, no protest marches. There is no visible act of violence. Instead, the mountain is removed from recognition through a policy memo, a reclassification on a GIS map, a quiet change in technical guidelines. The Aravalli is not physically destroyed; it is administratively decommissioned. Its absence becomes a matter of classification, not catastrophe — an administrative event, not an ecological one.
Modern bureaucratic systems excel at diluting moral responsibility. No individual officer deletes the Aravalli. No singular agency is accountable. The act of erasure is distributed across systems — survey departments, planning commissions, judicial interpretations — each performing its role within the logic of procedure. Each decision appears rational, even benign. And yet, taken together, they lead to the systemic disappearance of one of India’s oldest mountain ranges from the state’s ecological consciousness.
In this technocratic imagination, deep time holds no currency. Geological formations that have survived tectonic shifts and nourished diverse ecosystems for millennia are now dismissed as degraded and scattered. Because the Aravalli no longer aligns with short-term developmental goals, it is seen as obsolete — not valuable, not scenic, not productive. Resilience, however long it took to form, is no longer legible. Only immediate performance matters.
The Aravalli has not vanished; it has been forgotten by design. It is not that we cannot see the mountain. It is that we have trained ourselves not to see it. Its continued presence on the land is overshadowed by its disappearance from meaning.
Beneath this policy decision lies an affliction that cannot be corrected through legal petitions or environmental audits. What we are witnessing is a deeper and more dangerous erosion — a collapse of the ecological imagination. We no longer know how to notice what doesn’t demand spectacle. We no longer know how to feel for what is slow, scattered, or subtle.
The Aravalli does not offer the cinematic drama of a melting glacier or a raging wildfire. Its decline is silent. It erodes without announcement. It requires attentiveness to perceive and care to understand. But in a world increasingly conditioned by visual saturation and speed, slow loss becomes no loss at all. As the Aravalli loses its identity, humanity drifts closer to a crisis of perception — a shrinking of the field of what we find worthy of care.
We grieve visibly for charismatic megafauna — tigers, elephants, polar bears. We produce documentaries, campaigns, and merchandise in their name. But we do not grieve for termites, for soil, or for old mountain ranges that wear their age not as grandeur but as erosion. Our empathy has grown shallow, our field of recognition dangerously narrow.
What happens when this logic extends to human beings? What if worthiness were to be defined entirely by bio-physical metrics — height, weight, limbs, or sensory organs? We have already seen fascisms built on race, religion, and ideology. But the verdict on the Aravalli raises another terrifying question: could a legal system, over time, redraw the definition of human itself?
If law begins to decide who or what deserves recognition based solely on physical characteristics, would even human rights organisations be able to save us? Or will we have already rewritten the boundaries of care beyond return?
What do we do when a mountain is made invisible? When erasure becomes legal, and forgetting becomes policy?
We begin by reclaiming a moral ecology of recognition — a way of seeing that values presence over performance, and memory over measurability. This is not a rejection of science, but a resistance to its reduction. A mountain is never just its elevation. It is its history, its ecological function, its cultural resonance, and its capacity to hold memory across generations.
The Aravalli, even now, continues to teach us how to endure. It is not a failed mountain — it is a wise one. Its slopes may be worn, its ridges fragmented, but it still recharges groundwater, tempers the desert’s advance, and offers shelter to life. Its erosion carries knowledge. Its silence resists spectacle. It insists that resilience can be quiet. That beauty can be timeworn. That survival need not be spectacular to be sacred.
Let us preserve not just its terrain, but also its name. Let schoolchildren still learn its story. Let poets still write of its rugged grace. Let it remain on our maps, even if governments abandon it. To name is to remember. And to remember is to resist.
Beyond the Aravalli, we must reimagine development itself. Not as an architecture of forgetting, but as a practice of care. A model that does not erase the slow, the small, the old — but honours them. That values endurance over extraction, relation over replacement.
If we let the Aravalli disappear — not just physically, but conceptually — we lose more than a mountain. We lose a way of relating to the world. Let the mountain remain — in story, in soil, in struggle. Not only as form, but as a refusal to forget.
Kalpita Bhar Paul and Soumyajit Bhar work as Founding Assistant Professors with the School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth