The Mangar Bani sacred grove specifically, and the Aravalli hill forest commons of the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), India, provide a variety of ecosystem service benefits in this densely populated region. Recent pre-historic rock art and stone tool findings increase their significance. They also face threats from a variety of fronts – of tenure, of zoning, of landtype classification, and forest classification. The Aravalli land tenure has shifted in several different directions - from village commonland to contested privatized commonland, municipally appropriated commonland, or forest department government land. The zoning in the Delhi NCR towns at multiple scales – region, state, and city also drives the permissible landuses in the Aravallis. Changes in the landtype classification of the Aravallis in the revenue records dilute the applicability of protective regulation. Finally the legal recognition of the Aravallis as forests – hangs on whether they are formally notified as forest, or just recorded as forests in government records, or merely meet a ‘dictionary meaning of forest’ criteria, all of which have been contested over time. These threats are intensified closer to the capital city of Delhi, due to the heightened interest from the real estate and mining sectors. This practitioner perspective will explore how each of these factors are interpreted and play out over time and the role of different actors – the revenue, forest, environment, archaeology, mining and urban planning departments, the real estate and mining firms and the judiciary and local rural and urban communities. The paper will explore how these factors and actors influence the conservation and regeneration of the Aravalli hill forest commons of the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) while focusing on the case of the rural Mangar Bani sacred grove, the urban Aravalli Biodiversity Park and a few other cases.
