The Aravalis of south Haryana constitute at least one-third of the 3.59% forest cover of the state but they are being denied the status of a legal forest. On a visit to these hills , most would say that they are, in fact, forests. However, the state seems to be reluctant to accept Aravalis as forest.The Aravalis are one of the oldest ranges which start in Gujarat, pass through Rajasthan and Haryana and terminate in Delhi. This hill ranges , home to hundreds of flora and dozens of fauna , have been constantly under threat. Earlier, the major threat was indiscriminate mining, and now it is real estate and infrastructure activities.Several attempts have been made to protect these hill ranges in the past, and are continuing at present, but the lure of real estate seems to be rather compelling for the state as well as the real estate lobby. If we examine the background, we will realise that the state has several options to preserve the Aravalis. It can ensure the legal protection of the area as forest by recognising them as forests in records at a minimum. Or, it can simply declare them a deemed forests as per the “dictionary meaning”. Most of the Aravalis may not have the status of a reserve forest which is declared under Indian Forest Act, 1927. In land records, it’s tagged as ‘Gair Mumkin Pahar’ . Alternatively, the state government can re-notify the hills under Section 4 and 5 of the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA), 1900, as has been done many times in the past. An additional protection, in the Haryana districts of Gurgaon and Mewat,(and Alwar in Rajasthan),is the Aravali Notification issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forest(MoEF) in 1992, by which construction, mining and felling of trees are prohibited without prior approval.In the December 1996 judgment in the GodavarmanThirumulpad vs Union of India case, the Supreme Court had clarified that the term ‘forest’ must be understood according to its dictionary meaning. By this judgment, the SC directed the states to identify all the areas which are forests irrespective of the fact if they are recorded as forests or not. One month time was granted for the constitution of district-level committees and another month was given to committees to complete identification of forests. However, the exercise of identifying the non-recorded forest area was not completed. Again in 2011, the SC had directed in the Lafarge Judgment to complete the exercise of identifying forest areas — irrespective of how they are classified or notified — and also those areas which were earlier forests but stand degraded, denuded and cleared. The MoEF and the NCR Planning Board have also subsequently reiterated that the forests as per dictionary meaning or ‘deemed’ forests need to be identified.The Haryana government, however, in its wisdom only identified those areas notified under sections 4 and 5 of the PLPA, 1900, and left out all other forest areas. Even this limited identification of forests was attempted to be withdrawn by the state till the SC declared that the state could not now do a summersault, in 2004, in the MC Mehta case.The reluctance of the state government to identify forests is all the more curious when one looks at the state forest policy adopted by it. While the national target is 33% of forest and tree cover under the National Forest Policy, the state in Haryana’s forest policy of 2006 has set its own target of 10% forest and tree cover by 2010, and 20% in phased manner thereafter. At present, the state has a mere 3.59 % of area under the forest cover, the lowest percentage in the country. If the Aravalis are excluded from the forest cover, the total forest cover of the state is likely to decline to 2%.(Author is environmental lawyer. He has taken up various matters pertaining to the Aravali hills, including felling of trees, construction, pollution from waste dumps, water bodies and ponds.)

Stay updated with all the Latest Gurgaon headlines here. For more exclusive & live news updates from all around India, stay connected with NYOOOZ.