“A Solar Shield for the Aravallis: Turning Protection into a Performance Contract”, My Ind Maker, January 02, 2026
“The Aravallis are among the oldest mountain systems on Earth, running from the Delhi ridge through Haryana and Rajasthan into Gujarat, an ecological backbone for north-west India. Yet the range is steadily being eaten away by legal and illegal mining, encroachment, and the infrastructure that follows extraction—roads, ramps, pits, and dust. Periodic crackdowns make headlines, but they rarely change the underlying equilibrium: illegality remains profitable, enforcement remains episodic, and responsibility remains fragmented.
The problem has also become legally and administratively brittle. When the very definition of what constitutes the Aravallis becomes contested, regulators struggle to act with clarity, and violators exploit grey zones. In late December 2025, the Supreme Court kept a controversial Aravallis-related direction “in abeyance” and moved toward fresh expert consideration, an important reminder that enforcement cannot rest only on interpretive battles over lines on a map.
A durable strategy must do something harder than “crack down.” It must redesign incentives so that lawful actors occupy and defend vulnerable zones, while the public gains measurable ecological protection and local communities gain tangible benefits. That is the logic behind a proposal that may sound unconventional but is in fact deeply practical: deploy solar power—specifically dual-use agrivoltaics where appropriate—not as a standalone energy project, but as a protection instrument for the Aravallis’ degraded and mining-pressure landscapes……”
Read full article at myind.net
