When Neelam Ahlu-walia was working as an environmental investigative journalist with Doordarshan’s programme, Living on the Edge, in May 1997, a story and a man’s words changed her entire life’s trajectory.
Ahluwalia, now a 52-year-old Gurugram-based documentary filmmaker and communications consultant, had travelled to a remote coastal village in Odisha to report on illegal shrimp farming, and how industrialists that exported shrimp dumped untreated effluents in the nearby water, causing the fish to die and the farmers’ fields to become barren.
She recalls, “One night, I was speaking to some villagers when the industrialists’ henchmen came with lathis to get us to hand over the tapes and camera to them so no one ever sees the report. The villagers formed a human chain around us, and the village headman told us to leave and that they will take care of it. While I was leaving, he held my hand in his and said, ‘I hope the story that you do makes a difference to our lives.’”
When Ahluwalia came back, she couldn’t get the village headman’s voice out of her head, and decided to work with rural communities to help them preserve their ‘jal-jungle-zameen’.
An MSc in Environment Impact Assessment from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a sabbatical later, Ahluwalia started training villagers in Bundelkhand to report on climate-resilient agriculture, agroforestry and more through community radios, and helped them take these programmes to the remotest of villages.
Interestingly, Ahluwalia found her ikigai in the Aravalli hills—a 692-km range passing through Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. In 2012, she volunteered to help revive a 400-acre abandoned mining site in the Aravallis in Gurugram, where a vibrant forest has now come up. “In 2018, the Haryana government wanted to make a road cutting right through the middle of this forest, which would have displaced over 200 species of birds, reptiles, mammals, and plants. We protested, got school children involved in talking about this cause, and received a fair amount of media coverage. The government eventually had to back off,” she says.
A year later, in 2019, Ahluwalia and Gurugram-based residents started the Aravalli Bachao Citizens Movement when the Haryana government decided to amend the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA)—which gives protection to 30,000 hectares of forest land in Haryana—to open up 33% of the forest area for real estate. Following years of protests and campaigning, the Supreme Court in 2022 directed the government to demolish all illegal encroachments.
The movement has played a key role in ensuring that the Haryana government didn’t build a waste-to-energy plant at the site of the Bandhwari landfill since the leachate from the landfill had already impacted the groundwater, caused health issues for people living nearby, and led to an increase in pollution. Ahluwalia’s group also has had multiple run-ins with the National Green Tribunal (NGT) since they filed a case against illegal mining in 16 locations in Gurugram and Nuh. The government had to form an anti-mining task force and a cell where citizens could call in to complain about illegal mining activities.
In April 2024, Ahluwalia decided she wanted to work even more closely with rural communities directly impacted at the grassroots and founded the ‘People for Aravallis’ movement.
In 2023-2024, when Haryana designated over 24,000 hectares of Aravalli land as protected forest area to compensate for the destruction of Great Nicobar’s tropical rainforests (known as the Nicobar Swap), and the state mining department e-auctioned 119 acres of protected forest land in Mahendergarh district’s Rajawas village. Says Ahluwalia, “The Rajawas villagers from Mahendergarh in south Haryana approached us during the time we were campaigning for the Haryana green manifesto in August 2024 and we helped them highlight their concerns in the media. Seeing a media report, NGT took up the matter suo-motu in October 2024. People for Aravallis group helped the villagers with legal help to intervene in this matter in NGT in January 2025.”
She says, “The destruction of the Aravallis, India’s oldest mountain range, has resulted in irreversible changes. With the mountains being destroyed, the rivers have dried up.”
“It is my privilege to work with rural people who are connected with their land and safeguard their rivers, forests and hills because they are the ones suffering even though they have been working to preserve their ecology,” adds Ahluwalia.
