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  • mackenzieshreve
    • Mar 27, 2023
    • 6 min read

Aravallis Deserve Natural World Heritage Status

Updated: Apr 19, 2023

These ancient but forgotten mountain folds protect 1 billion in India from desertification.

By: Mackenzie & Mihir


Great grandmother to the Himalayas, the Aravalli Mountain folds formed a staggering 2.5 billion years ago in the Precambrian period. This was long before the South Asian subcontinent drifted across the ocean and crashed into the Eurasian landmass, forming the now 50-million-year-old Himalayas. Eons ago when the Aravallis were a part of Antarctica, no human beings existed to know how this range would one day provide ecological stability and shelter for people to form what became one of the most ancient, complex, and resilient cultures in the world: the culture of India. Today the greatest threat to the vibrance of India and its culture is no longer colonization, but rather it is the internal struggle to reign in corruption and protect its natural heritage, the literal foundation of its cultural and economic roots. The extensive and rapidly escalating deterioration of the Aravallis, with deforestation rendering the hills barren and mining grinding the folds to the ground, is putting the future of ecological and climate stability, freshwater availability and biodiversity of India at stake.

Aravallis: Deserving of World Heritage Status

The Aravallis stand as a wall protecting mainland India from the advancement of the great Afro-Asian desert, which starts in the Sahara, stretches across the Middle East and stops in Rajasthan as the Thar Desert, at the foot of the Aravallis. This wall has relentlessly stopped the dust-laden westerly winds from drying out the lush heart of central India for millions of years, proving to be India’s most reliable line of defense against desertification. This natural green shield that stretches across northwest India in a diagonal line from Delhi, southwest across Rajasthan and into Gujarat has also played the extremely crucial role of a gigantic aquifer over millennia, absorbing monsoon rains and slowly releasing the water again throughout its vast network of underground aquifers and forest streams, which feed larger rivers and watersheds. The vitality of the forests on this range forced the Thar to taper off in the past, but now with many of the forests cut long ago and mountains disappearing at an astonishing rate, the Thar is advancing with the winds, penetrating gaps in the range and getting closer and closer to the fertile plains of India.


Over the last five years, intensifying dust storms in Delhi have become more pronounced, leaving the capital city helpless. These deadly storms are evidence of the extreme destruction that has already ravaged the northern-most reach of the Aravallis.[1] Extensive gaps in the Aravallis, where mountains have been mined to the ground, are easy to find through surveys of google map images over time. The square kilometers’ of forest cover loss is even greater than extensive mining; yet, this clearing of the land foretells even further mining activity. Despite Supreme Court orders and alarms raised by the National Green Tribunal, official action to preserve what is left of the Aravallis and further re-green the hills are depressingly lacking.[2] In fact, the inaction and lack of accountability in the legal and political systems are enabling extensive land and mining mafia and directly putting the climatic stability of millions, if not a billion, Indian citizens at stake. Numerous officials take bribes, collaborate with offenders, fail to execute legal duties and flat-out ignore laws while others are targeted or outright murdered for fulfilling their basic responsibilities of filing legitimate environmental complaints. This pattern of action and inaction is common knowledge from Delhi to Ahmedabad.


In the past decade, a pan-African alliance has formed and gotten global support to plant the 8,000-kilometer Great Green Wall of Africa, a reforestation and land upgradation project designed to prevent the spread of the Sahara Desert further south.[3] In direct contrast, however, India is complacent in the complete destruction of its natural Great Green Wall. If Africans can coordinate efforts across 20 countries and extensive global funding to prevent desertification, can India not coordinate across 5 states to preserve the vitality of the farm lands and jungles, not to mention the liveable temperatures, of central India?


The Green Wall of India was proposed in 2019 at the Conference of Parties held in New Delhi by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) with the aim of planting a 5-kilometer wide and 1400-kilometer-long forest-barrier along the foothills of the western side of the Aravallis. Though the proposal enjoyed ample media attention, it did not gain momentum and the project was never approved, leaving the Aravallis forgotten again. Though the reasons that this proposal failed are unknown, it can be presumed that the political will to acquire land or creatively negotiate such an endeavor failed to materialize. In other words, the cost and land acquisition required for a massive green-way does not enjoy the importance, let alone the expedience given for highways and industrial corridors, despite the extreme temperatures already oppressing millions in Rajasthan.


Planting the seeds for the Green Wall of India would spark hope in India’s youth and future generations in addition to being a strong step towards national security, yet it would fall short of recognizing and protecting the heritage that this range constitutes. The Aravallis are home to cultural practices as well as geological and biological features that exemplify the ancient earth, ancient human culture and unique zones of cross-continental species evolution. Bhil tribal villages dot the southern stretch of these mountain folds, home to their elders holding encyclopedic knowledge of the biodiversity of the region. Together, these features of the Aravallis fulfill the United Nations’ requirements to be considered as a World Heritage Site.[4]


The time has come for this national and global heritage to be recognized not only for iconic species like the tiger, but also for smaller species like the flying squirrel, floating on hot nights between the muhua trees deep in the Rajasthani jungles, jungles where tigers, in fact, used to roam. The recognition of these lesser mountains and their biological and cultural wonders as priceless possessions of India and repositories of awe for future generations is a critical and immediate need.


Do we not need places where youth can stare off into the vastness of the night sky far from city lights, be amazed at uncountable stars, and lose themselves in a sense of awe as their eyes trace the shape of the milky way? Where will the young explorers go, to sit quietly in the deep night and wait for a crackle of branches to flip on a flashlight and see the shining eyes of the ever-elusive flying squirrel? Do India’s future generations not have a right to feel the freedom of the universe and surrender to a sense of awe just as much as they have a right to a meaningful education and viable livelihood? More pointedly, does the next generation not have a right to clean air and water, a stable temperature and rainfall, all of which can only be provided by vibrant wild systems sprawling in a vast web across the Aravallis?


Immediate Action to Arrest Desertification

If organizing a national-level World Heritage pitch is too tall of an order considering the urgency of the matter as seen in the quickly deteriorating landscape, enforcing the protection of the reserved forests and wildlife sanctuaries of the Aravallis would be a start. Immediate action to conserve at least the remaining forests of the Aravallis would go a long way in protecting critical ecosystem services such green cover provides: groundwater recharge at a massive scale, air-cooling for thousands of square kilometers, and air purification for millions.


What does immediate action look like? It boils down to accountability and transparency, the double-edged sword that could defend the chopping down and burning of the forests of the Aravallis. There is a critical need to double-down on monitoring forests zoned as protected, reserved and wildlife sanctuaries and create an effective system of accountability. This ideally requires both the forest department as well as civil society including active student bodies to create a robust monitoring system that can acquire real-time deforestation information, address grievances immediately, and compile GIS reports detailing the forest loss in the last 20, 10 and 5 years in each area. A collaborative approach between the forest department, university professors and students, and active civil society members and NGOs could result in not only the saving, but the strengthening of India’s age-old line of defense against the desert, the all-but-forgotten warrior spanning all the kingdoms of Rajasthan and the coveted capital of Delhi, the Aravalli Range.





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