Welcome to the one-stop window for everything related to Mangar Bani with special focus on legality — organized as a set of gallery cards. Open any card in the gallery to find curated links, documents, and databases.
***Mangar Bani is the last-standing primary forest in Haryana, nestled between Gurugram and Faridabad. It is ancient enough that its Dhau trees have root systems older than the state that endeavours to protect them. It recharges the groundwater that the region depends on, holds the Aravalli soil together, and shelters species that have nowhere else to go. Home to some of the earliest cave paintings and stone tools, dating all the way back to the Palaeolithic era.
It has survived because the community that lives alongside it has, for generations, treated it as sacred, as the forest of the deity Gudariya Das Baba. What it has not survived is the law's inability to recognise what it plainly is, a forest! Mangar Bani does not meet the technical definition of a forest under current legislation, which leaves it exposed to the very forces that community reverence held at bay for so long. People have always known that this place mattered. The law is yet to understand it.
This website is an attempt to close that gap, to build the legal, historical, and public record that a place this old and this important deserves, before it is too late to matter.***
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We are four students affiliated with the Environmental Law Clinic, Jindal Global Law School, Haryana, India: Tulsi, Tharun, Mahaneeya, and Dhruv. As passionate students of environment and the law, we decided to embark on this endeavour to bring forth the necessary attention that Mangar Bani deserves as the lungs of the NCR. Through this one-stop webpage, we have not only tried to collect all the legal resources and information relevant for Mangar Bani, but we have also given voices to the voiceless through More than Human Voices (which would be highlighting the perspectives of the species and the habitat), and tried to bring in our reflective voice through our individual field notes. This is an output that came out of the Planetary Citizenship: Reimagining Legal Frameworks for the Rights of Nature clinical course of the Environmental Law Clinic, in collaboration with Socratus Collective Wisdom Corporation. This output was made possible through the help of multiple people and mentors along the way, specifically, Prof. Prakhar Pandey (our course instructor), Prof. Sampada Nayak, Smriti Tiwari, Sumit Saurav, and Nithin Vemula at Socratus, Sunil Harsana and Nitesh Kaushik (conservationists at the front-lines of Mangar Bani), Chetan Agrawal (ecologist working towards protection of the Aravalli ranges). We would like to acknowledge all their valuable inputs and significant contributions in making this website possible.
For any further information, please contact us at [email protected]
(Cover Image: AI Assisted Image)