Critically examine the Supreme Court's use of expert committees and continuing judicial oversight in environmental governance, with reference to the Aravalli hills case.

Since the Godavarman litigation, the Supreme Court has governed forests through "continuing mandamus" — retaining jurisdiction indefinitely and referring technical questions to expert panels. The ongoing Aravalli hills proceedings reveal both the necessity and the costs of this model.

Merits of the committee-plus-oversight approach

• Fills a regulatory vacuum: the absence of a uniform definition of the "Aravalli hills and range" across Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat enabled mining in fragile zones; the Court took suo motu cognisance and kept the contested 100-metre local-relief criterion in abeyance pending expert study [1][2].
• Supplies technical competence: the five-member High-Powered Committee under Kanchan Devi (DG, ICFRE), including former heads of the Forest Survey of India and Geological Survey of India, gives the Bench science it cannot generate itself [3].
• Forces federal coordination: notice to the Centre and four States pushes one standard where inter-State negotiation had stalled [1].
• Builds participation and urgency: the panel must hear tribal communities of Rajasthan and Gujarat, and may file issue-specific interim reports on pressing questions [4].

Limitations

• Delay defeats protection: the report due 31 August 2026 slipped; the Court refused a six-month extension and fixed 30 November 2026 as final [4]. Extraction continues while definitions remain unsettled.
• Accountability deficit: such panels are unelected and outside legislative scrutiny; the only real sanction is reconstitution.
• Separation of powers: fixing an ecological boundary and framing mining policy is delegated rule-making under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, exercised here in a judicial forum.
• Institutional substitution: judicial primacy can crowd out statutory regulators, even as the executive runs the Aravalli Green Wall Project for landscape restoration [5].

The Aravalli case shows expert committees as a legitimate second-best — indispensable when regulation lags, yet no substitute for it. The way forward is a statutory MoEFCC definition, time-bound panels with published methodology, and strengthened NGT and CAMPA-backed enforcement, so that the Article 21 right to a healthy environment and SDG-15 goals rest on governance rather than litigation.