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The Supreme Court appointed Central Empowered Committee’s (CEC) nod to a private luxury high-rise amidst a DDA colony in Vasant Kunj in May 2025 opens floodgates for speculative requisitioning of new project sites in ecologically fragile zones of Delhi’s Aravalli. The fact that authorities entrusted with protecting the ridge area from rampant encroachment found little value in obstructing this onslaught heralds a travesty of justice in terms of protecting the vestiges of ‘Delhi’s green lungs’. This unexpected move, considering the numerous environmental and forest laws it flouts, needs a serious review. Interestingly, the plot of land for which this approval was granted falls within the morphological ridge of the Aravalli, as conclusively ascertained by the CEC in its report submitted to the Supreme Court (SC) on May 14, 2025. Indeed, the CEC recommendation to a private builder, a first on Delhi’s Ridge, is astonishing in light of the consumerist versus conservationist needs of the city.
A cursory examination reveals a slew of landmark judgments in the decade between 1980 and 1990 aimed at the conservation of India’s forests. These stood tenaciously against mindless forest clearances by state governments for various developmental projects. The Forest Conservation Act 1980, empowered the central government to place restrictions on the states diverting forests or using forest land for non-forest purposes. In the national capital, the RMB was constituted by the Government of NCT of Delhi in 1995. Key cases, such as M.C. Mehta vs. Union of India and others and Godavarman vs. Union of India and others, prompted the SC to address the deteriorating forests and allied environmental concerns. The SC awarded the RMB a custodian status of Delhi’s Ridge in 1996 and created the CEC in 2002, a high-powered group of experts that included forest officers and representatives from civil society to be the eyes and ears of the SC. However a significant shift occurred in 2023 when the CEC was reconstituted to become a permanent body under MoEF&CC, with only government officials as its members enabling it to have the final say on CEC recommendations, leading to a complicated stance on CEC’s efficacy, autonomy and impartiality.
Though CEC is mandated to oversee the environmental governance framework and ensure compliance with conservation laws, its role in protecting Delhi’s Ridge has been bleak. A 2024 report to the SC by the CEC recorded a diversion of 301.8 hectares (746 acres) of the ridge/forests for non-forest purposes over a mere nine years (2015 to 2023) by the RMB. What the report, however, failed to highlight was that the projects were approved, not in isolation but with the active participation of CEC. For instance, the 2017 PPP waste-to-energy plant at Tehkhand, where 20.4 hectares (50.431 acres) of morphological/extended ridge was diverted for non-forest use, was approved by the CEC and cleared by the SC. Similarly, the SPA (8 hectares) campus area on the Vasant Kunj ridge, National Highway 236 between Andheria More and Delhi-Haryana border (2.8 hectares), construction of buildings in JNU (2.937 hectares) and many more have also been recommended by the CEC.
The CEC’s public records reveal an examination of about 56 projects so far in the Delhi Ridge area. The CEC website shows that 43 have received a nod citing ‘public interest’. Of these, CEC recommended minor/cosmetic changes in 11 projects on Delhi’s Ridge, while 32 were passed without any change at all. Therefore, in effect, the CEC’s efforts in protecting Delhi’s Ridge resulted in a diversion of about 367.64 hectares (908.45 acres) to date. Also, stark has been the near-absent media outrage and low-key, sporadic protests by non-profits.
The final breach in the conservation of the Ridge and its extended areas has come with CEC recommending (in application no. 1587 and 1608) the first 13-storey private luxury apartments at Khasra No. 1230/2 amidst a gated Vasant Kunj colony this May. CEC’s move made it to the headlines of prominent dailies, opening up room for profiteers to grab real estate opportunities on the Ridge in and around the area. Startlingly, the CEC report opines that although the parcel of land in question falls within the extended ridge area and is protected, it was “observed that the ‘subject land’ is flat land…” during their visit. This observation is an ominous operative key. Land can be scalped off its ridge-like features, paving the way for retrospective affirmatives from the CEC and proliferating construction of private high-end buildings. Several new areas are now likely to be subjected to this onslaught, unravelling decades of uphill gruntwork towards the protection of the Ridge. Considering that no human hand can remake what is being lost, geologically or ecologically, CEC’s recommendations raise serious questions.
The author is the founder of the Parliamentary and Administrative Institute (PARI), New Delhi.
director@pariparliament.org
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