BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR
Illegal mining has ravaged the Aravallis in the past few decades. JITENDRA from Rajasthan and Haryana and SHAGUN KAPIL in Delhi investigate the loss and trace the legal developments
ABDAL KHAN is a prisoner of geography. A resident of Nimli village in Rajasthan’s Alwar district, Khan, who claims to be over 100 years old, is mostly bedridden in his home nestled in the foothills of the Aravallis. He stays quiet most of the time, but a mention of the Aravallis triggers an outburst. “I have accompanied British officials on hunting tours on these hills. Where we are sitting now was once a thick forest,” he says. There are only a few like him alive, who can remember the once ecologically rich Aravallis and also witnessed its gradual demise. His youngest daughter, Dini Bi, who is half his age, lives some 50 km north in Banban village of the same district, also located in the mountain range, which has almost disappeared. While Khan laments the loss of forests, his daughter is not so mournful. “It was good when the mountain was there. But mining gave us jobs,” she says.
This is the chronology of the dying Aravallis. Within one generation, millions who once found it the axis of their sustenance, are now reconciled to the loss of one of the planet’s oldest physical features. This despite the fact that village after village have reported changes in the local ecology after the mountain range’s degradation, with significant impact on the people’s lives.
The account of Khan is a telling comment on the degradation the Aravallis due to mining. Though the Supreme Court banned mining in the range in 2002, unless cleared by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (moefcc), illegal mining has continued, sometimes on a scale even larger than that of legal mining operations. A 2018 report by Supreme Court-appointed Central Empowered Committee (cec) says that 25 per cent of the Aravalli range has been lost due to illegal mining in Rajasthan since 1967-68 and over 10,300 hectares (ha) have been affected outside the lease boundary in the 15 districts where 80 per cent of the Aravallis are located.
“Extent of illegal mining in terms of percentage area exceeds 100 per cent in many cases, especially in respect of smaller mines allotted for minor mineral,” the report says, which was based on satellite images of 20082010. While the committee recommended the Rajasthan government immediately stop all mining activities outside the legally sanctioned mining leases and identify and prosecute those involved, experts and activists working to conserve the Aravallis rue the poor implementation of the laws on the ground. A 2017 Comptroller and Auditor General of India (cag) report says 4,072 cases of illegal mining, transportation and storage of minerals have been registered between 2011-12 and 2016-17. Around 9. 8 million tonnes of minerals were found to have been illegally excavated.
The Aravalli mountain range that spans four states—Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi—was never continuous, but mining and construction activities have made it even more broken. Of 128 hills/ hillocks of Alwar district in Rajasthan that were sampled from the total 2,269, it was observed that 31 hills/hillocks have vanished from the time the Survey of India topographic sheets were prepared in 1967-68, says the
cec report. The gaps were recorded by satellite pictures and verified on the ground.
“Just recently we witnessed a hillock in Mokhampura village on National
“For most of my life, the Aravallis were a dense forest, full of wildlife. From the 1990s, the vegetation started thinning and now the hills have turned completely barren” —Abdal Khan, a farmer from Nimli village , Rajasthan “The Aravallis no longer provide fodder, nor bring rain. As a result, groundwater is depleting due to overextraction and the fields are turning into a desert” —Raja Ram Bhamla, a farmer from Harchandpur village, Haryana
Highway 8, some 70 km from Jaipur. Half of it is eroded and it will be completely lost in another year,” says Ambuj Kishore, programmes director at Association for Rural Advancement through Voluntary Action and Local Involvement, an organisation set up by the Rajasthan government to promote voluntary action for the state’s socio-economic development.
Degradation of Aravallis is also evident in the loss of forest cover. During 1972-75, the Aravalli districts in Rajasthan recorded 10,462 sq km of area under various categories of forest. By 1981-84, the forest cover reduced to 6,116 sq km, says a 2018 report by Delhi-based Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (rgics).
Haryana has a similar story. Of its 22 districts, Aravallis are present in Mewat, Faridabad, Gurugram, Mahendragarh and Rewari, all of which are currently, or were till recently, heavily mined and have undergone rapid developmental and construction activities (see ‘Mountain of troubles’ on
p38). In Gurugram’s Harchandpur village, the groundwater has severely depleted due to mining and stone-crushing units in surrounding areas and mushrooming of real estate projects in adjoining districts. Raja Ram Bhamla, a farmer of Harchandpur, says that two decades ago, water was available at a depth of about 10 m, but now one has to drill 150 m. “The Aravallis no longer provide fodder, nor bring rain. As a result, groundwater is depleting due to over-extraction and the fields are turning into a desert,” he says.
The depleting groundwater in Harchandpur has had another side-effect. It has triggered a termite epidemic. “The presence of water chokes the pores of the soil and kills termites. But when the soil becomes dry, termite attacks increase,” says O P Yadav, director of Central Arid Zone Research Institute, Jodhpur, Rajasthan.
The termite problem has, in turn, triggered changes in crop patterns. Earlier, farmers in Harchandpur grew pulses. But now they have shifted to water-intensive mustard and wheat because the water protects the crop from termites. But since the crops are water-intensive, the farmers extract more water from the ground and the vicious cycle is draining the groundwater.
Like Rajasthan, Haryana too is losing forest cover. A study by the Wildlife Institute of India (wii) said that while green cover has declined in Haryana between 1980 and 2016, human settlement has increased by