On 20 November 2025, the Supreme Court of India said that only hills above 100 meters above the local terrain should be considered as the ‘Aravalli Hills and Ranges.’ This was done based on the recommendations of a Union Government of India panel regarding what should be considered as the Aravallis (here and here). This definition reportedly makes at least 90% of the Aravallis not part of the ‘Aravallis and they lose legal protection. This led activists to launch campaigns to ‘save’ Aravalli (Aravalli bachao) as this could lead to mining and construction activities in that region (here, here, and here). On 29 December 2025, the Supreme Court kept in abeyance its earlier directions concerning the change in definition of Aravalli Hills, after expressing concern that the expert committee report and the Court’s observations were being misconstrued.
In this context, a video of a rally is being shared on social media, claiming to be the visuals of a ‘save Aravalli’ protest. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of the recent Save Aravali Protests.
Fact: The video actually shows villagers in Khairagarh, Chhattisgarh, protesting against a proposed cement plant, and is unrelated to the Aravalli hills controversy. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To verify the claim, we conducted a reverse image search on several keyframes from the viral video. This search led us to an Instagram post from 7 December 2025 that contained the same video. According to the description of this post, the video shows a protest in Khairagarh, Chhattisgarh, against the Shree Cement plant.
Taking this as a hint, we ran a keyword search on the internet and found video news reports (here, here, and here) from 6 and 7 December 2025 that contained the visuals seen in the viral video.
As per these reports, the visuals show a protest by thousands of people from around 40 villages in the Chhuikhadan village, Khairagarh-Chhuikhandan-Gandai district (KCG), Chhattisgarh.
Additionally, we found a few other news reports (here, here, here, here, and here) about this protest from the same period, according to which the protest was against ‘Shree Cement Limited’s limestone quarry project.’
As per the reports, the protestors submitted a memorandum to the local Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) to suspend a public hearing that was scheduled for 11 December 2025. Which eventually got postponed.
To sum up, an old and unrelated video of a protest in Charrisgargh is shared as visuals of a ‘Save Aravalli’ protest.
