On December 23 Air Marshal and the Built-in Defence Workers chief Ashutosh Dixit laid out the defence institution’s case for essential minerals. Fashionable defence programs, he stated, depend on dependable entry to those minerals and import dependence has develop into a strategic vulnerability as a result of world provide chains are concentrated and uncovered to export controls and geopolitics. He additionally linked self sufficiency in defence manufacturing and operational readiness to safe mineral worth chains and pointed to the Nationwide Important Mineral Mission because the nation’s coverage car of alternative.
Even when they had been understated, his phrases come because the defence institution’s contribution to the charged public debate over how the Aravalli Hills must be protected and whether or not their mineral wealth must be mined.
Proper now, India doesn’t resolve clashes between its local weather commitments and industrial demand via any clear guidelines. As an alternative it typically resorts to government discretion and opaque devices like workplace memoranda, project-specific exemptions, and advert hoc value determinations that deal with “nationwide defence” or “strategic issues” as adequate cause to evade scrutiny. The environmental impression evaluation (EIA) framework itself permits exemptions from public session for initiatives linked to safety and different strategic issues “as decided by the Central Authorities”. This along with the federal government’s disinclination to bind itself to clear standards has typically rendered the scope of “nationwide curiosity” arbitrary and opaque, nonetheless.
Aid and hindrance
Controversy over the Aravalli Hills flared up after November 20, when the Supreme Courtroom adopted a uniform option to determine the “hills and ranges”, froze new mining leases till the Surroundings Ministry had ready a sustainable mining plan for the panorama, and stated mining must be prohibited in “core” or “inviolate” areas, with an exception for essential, strategic and atomic minerals notified below the Mines and Minerals (Improvement and Regulation) Act 1957. The Courtroom referred to as this a “strategic exemption”.
Within the new operational definition vis-à-vis mining, “Aravalli Hills” is any landform within the Aravalli districts that rises at the very least 100 m above the native reduction (measured from the bottom contour line encircling the landform). Likewise the “Aravalli Vary” is 2 or extra such Aravalli Hills that lie inside 500 m of one another, together with the landforms in between.
Environmental teams and opposition events have argued that this definition might nonetheless exclude giant tracts from safety and weaken enforcement in a panorama already harassed by unlawful mining, city enlargement, denudation, and a dropping water desk. As an illustration, if a surveyor attracts the Aravalli Hills’ boundary utilizing the elevation and distance guidelines, the brand new panorama that emerges can be of ‘Aravalli’-like characteristic sitting like islands in a sea of non-‘Aravalli’ options, together with valleys, plains, scrubland, and forests. But the latter join the Aravalli Hills and make the present panorama nearly as good because it at the moment is.
And simply these options are endangered by the identical Surroundings Ministry that should execute the sustainable mining plan — no matter it seems to be like — additionally having weakened the authorized surroundings safety framework to advertise ease of doing enterprise, creating gaps that make the “strategic exemption” simpler to misuse.
Scope creep
The Ministry has repeatedly softened India’s environmental clearance course of to cut back friction for initiatives and industrial investments since 2014. Two choices in 2025 are notable. First, in Might, the Supreme Courtroom had held that ex publish facto clearances are alien to environmental jurisprudence and “anathema” to the environmental impression evaluation (EIA) framework as a result of they invert the logic of prior scrutiny and may result in irreparable environmental injury. However in November, the Courtroom recalled that judgment on overview, reopening the house for publish facto regularisation, this time with the Courtroom’s personal uncertainty constructed into the regulatory house. This ingredient wasn’t there earlier than.
Second, in September, the Surroundings Ministry issued an workplace memorandum to speed up mining initiatives involving essential minerals by exempting them from public consultations as required by the EIA Notification 2006. This transfer didn’t require the notification to be amended as a result of it already features a particular clause for “strategic issues”, and the Ministry used that to speed up initiatives whereas additionally decreasing the formal house the place affected communities and unbiased consultants might power the federal government to reveal particulars of dangers and cumulative impression. Ministers additionally defended the transfer in Parliament on nationwide safety grounds.
Subsequent, the Forest (Conservation) Modification Act 2023 and subsequent administrative practices have widened the exemptions for sure actions and have launched new classes of land and initiatives with modified clearance necessities. The amended Act applies to land notified as ‘forest’ below the Indian Forest Act 1927 (or different legal guidelines) and land recorded as forest in authorities information on or after October 25, 1980, but it exempted land that had already been shifted to non-forest use on or earlier than December 12, 1996, by a State or UT order. It additionally exempted land alongside roads and railway tracks, the worldwide border, and close to “security-related infrastructure” and expanded the checklist of actions not handled as “non-forest objective”.
Because of this, the Centre and States can now gather info by drilling slim holes throughout exploration to drag up rock samples earlier than having to file a mining proposal. And in forest districts with mineral deposits and which overlap with areas notified as harbouring left-wing extremism, it’s now simpler to ascertain some connective infrastructure likeroads and energy traces, which may additionally help exploration and different mining work.
Certain, the amendments don’t exempt mining outright, however there’s a scope creep that, along with the federal government’s sympathetic perspective in direction of companies and the publish facto regularisation regime, deserves scrutiny. If nothing else, it serves the state’s framing of exploration as a part of a strategic pipeline for essential minerals, a story supported by ministers’ statements in Parliament and in official paperwork.
Strategic legitimacy
That is additionally why the general public controversy over the Aravalli Hills issues a lot. The Supreme Courtroom order itself linked the Hills to groundwater recharge and to features that stop desertification, that are the identical ecosystem companies that India must protect to satisfy outcomes linked to the Sustainable Improvement Targets, together with clear air, water safety, and good dwelling situations.
The Hills additionally comprise or are believed to have potential for minerals that India’s strategic planners care about, together with base metals in sure established belts, minerals reminiscent of tungsten and others typically labeled as ‘strategic’, and different bulk minerals together with stone and rocks. The Courtroom-appointed committee has additionally emphasised the potential for minerals related to the inexperienced power transition, together with lithium and rare-earth parts. This mix, along with the Ministry’s weakening of safeguards, makes the Courtroom’s “strategic exemption” precarious.
Taken collectively the state has additionally successfully diminished the data that outsiders can entry to carry claims of greenness — together with “sustainable mining” and the round economic system of essential minerals that the brand new Nationwide Important Minerals Mission guarantees — accountable.
If India goes to invoke a “strategic” must carve out exceptions in delicate areas, it also needs to formalise the way it arbitrates these conflicts, as a substitute of letting them be negotiated via exemptions and post-hoc regularisation. At a minimal, the federal government or the Courtroom ought to set up a binding take a look at for when “strategic issues” advantage easier or simpler procedures; require landscape-level cumulative-impact and groundwater assessments earlier than all leases; and disclose, within the public document, assumptions concerning the options — together with imports, substitution, recycling, and sourcing from much less delicate areas — that had been rejected. With out such a framework, local weather motion and financial progress will hold colliding via advert hoc choices that broaden quietly whereas environmental legislation is left to soak up the political stress.
In actual fact if the Indian authorities accepts the defence and industrial institutions’ case that essential minerals are strategic enablers, it also needs to settle for that strategic provide chains want strategic legitimacy. This contains the Courtroom’s instructions however also needs to be augmented by the Surroundings Ministry ceasing its parallel efforts to widen exemptions and scale back procedural checks. On the query of those minerals, the stakes are greater and the temptation to take shortcuts is bigger.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
Printed – December 29, 2025 07:30 am IST
