The Aravallis were old before the Himalayas were born, raised in the Proterozoic more than a billion years ago, and for most of that unimaginable span they have done the quiet, unglamorous work of a frontier: turning back the Thar, recharging the aquifers beneath Rajasthan, holding the air over Delhi a fraction cleaner than it would otherwise be. They are less a feature on the map than a witness to it, older than every kingdom that ever sheltered in their rain-shadow.
We have repaid that service with dynamite. When the Supreme Court froze the grant of new mining leases across the Aravalli stretches of Rajasthan, Haryana, Gujarat and Delhi in November last year ~ pending a single landscape-wide Management Plan for Sustainable Mining, a blueprint drawn up through the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education to mark out where the hills may be cut and where they may not ~ it seemed, for a moment, that geology had won. Then the Court did something rarer than a moratorium. On the twenty-ninth of December it stayed its own judgment, conceded that the definition needed a firmer scientific basis, and placed the question in abeyance pending a high-powered expert committee that must report by the end of this August.
A mountain range held in abeyance is a strange legal object. The order that put it there had fixed an elevation test ~ any landform rising a hundred metres or more above the surrounding ground would count as Aravalli ~ and the test was promptly attacked as too clinical by half, a metric that on careless application would have lifted protection from the low ridges, valleys and wildlife corridors that make up the greater part of the range. The Court’s retreat was an admission worth pausing on: that a living landscape cannot be carved into arbitrary contour lines, that the right unit of judgment is the whole system and not the isolated parcel.
The committee now at work will decide, in effect, how much of the oldest range on the subcontinent the law agrees to see ~ and until it reports, the hills survive on a stay order and a promise, which is not protection but postponement. And the instant one accepts that a mountain must be judged whole, the mind travels, almost inevitably, from the ridge to the boardroom. We have spent the past few years building, with real ambition, an architecture meant to hold companies to ecological account – and we have built it without a spine. The Securities and Exchange Board now requires the largest listed firms to file what is called BRSR Core: a Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report, distilled into nine measured indicators ~ greenhouse emissions, water, energy, waste, workplace safety, gender, inclusive growth and governance ~ and verified to a demanding standard. The obligation reaches the top five hundred companies for the year just closed and widens to the top thousand the year after.
The disclosure is real. The numbers are now assured. And almost nothing happens to a company that lies in them. It is worth being precise about what that assurance does, because the comfort it offers is narrower than it sounds. The assurer examines the disclosed figure – the tonnes of carbon, the kilolitres of water – and forms an opinion on whether that figure is fairly stated. The assurer does not walk the mined ridge. He does not reconcile satellite imagery against lease boundaries, transport records against royalty receipts, or a restoration claim against the unhealed pit it describes. He certifies the number on the page. He does not police the act behind it.
A company can therefore report its emissions with scrupulous accuracy and still operate in a manner the law, the courts and the affected villages would recognise as ruinous. The figure is true. The story it implies is a fiction. That gap between number and conduct is not a theoretical worry. An empirical study of the Nifty 50 last year found close to half the index ~ the concentration strongest in manufacturing and energy ~ practising some form of greenwashing, the dressing of an ordinary or damaging environmental record in the borrowed language of virtue.
The regulator itself has named the problem in unusually concrete terms: a whole-time member of SEBI catalogued, early last year, a manufacturer reporting no significant environmental impact while facing prosecution for environmental violations, a carmaker claiming recycled inputs it could not substantiate, an oil and gas company simply omitting what it found inconvenient. He warned, more recently, that the temptation will only grow as assurance deadlines bite and the gap between claim and conduct becomes more profitable to disguise. Yet read against that candour, the silence in the statute book is total.
Neither the Companies Act nor the securities regulations contain a definition of greenwashing; no provision names it as an offence; no authority is charged with policing the distance between the report and the reality. Enforcement against a false sustainability claim has no institutional home. It is an orphan. The deception is cheap precisely because it is safe, and cheapness invites theatre. A ridge does not regenerate because a key performance indicator is presented to two decimal places; the dust over Haryana does not thin because an annual report carries a photograph of saplings. What the disclosure regime has produced, in its present form, is an elaborate grammar of virtue with no verb of consequence attached. We have learned to measure the damage.
We have not learned to mind it. That alone would be a serious failure of design. But the more disfiguring defect lies elsewhere ~ at the one moment when the law has the power to reprice corporate behaviour, when a company that has hollowed out a hillside finally fails and passes through the machinery of insolvency, and the ledger is opened to be settled. It is there that the silence becomes structural, and there that the institution India has refused to build is most conspicuously absent. That is the subject of the second part of this argument.
The writer is a practising Chartered Accountant and Vedantic Scholar and can be reached at kannan@cakt.in