Stretching over 670 kilometres from Gujarat to Delhi, the Aravalli Range is among the oldest mountain systems on the planet, predating even the Himalayas. For decades, the Aravallis have been treated less as an ecological system but more as a cache of exploitable land – mined, built over, and reshaped through regulatory permissions that prioritised economic use over environmental function. The Aravalli Hills have not declined merely through blatant violations of law, but through quiet acts of reclassification – through decisions about what qualifies as a hill, what is deemed “revenue land,” and what may therefore be mined, flattened, or sold. As the urban frontiers of Gurugram and Faridabad expanded outward, the Aravallis were simultaneously compressed inward, not by physical erasure but by administrative redefinition. Scientific research has long demonstrated that fragmentation of even low-lying ridge systems weakens groundwater recharge and ecological stability across the National Capital Region, yet these warnings were routinely overridden by land records designed for profiteering rather than ecology. This practice displays how seemingly neutral administrative classifications can undermine ecological integrity and while doing so, compromise the constitutional safeguard of environmental rights implicit in Article 21.