Gurgaon: For much of the year, the Aravalis around the city, Faridabad and Nuh are a landscape of dry rocky slopes, scrubland and dusty valleys. After the recent spell of heavy rain, that has changed. Water is now flowing through the valleys, spilling over rocky outcrops and turning seasonal streams into temporary waterfalls, from Ghamroj, Gairatpur Bas, Khod Basai and Kotla to stretches of the range near Faridabad.Videos of cascades cutting through the usually dry terrain have spread on social media, drawing visitors to several spots. In the space of a few heavy showers, waterfalls have appeared on slopes that were bone dry a fortnight ago. Check dams built by the forest department are full to the brim and spilling over, and rocky depressions that sat empty through April, May and June are now quiet pools ringed by startlingly green vegetation.At Ghamroj, rainwater is cascading down exposed rock faces in a clean, seasonal waterfall — footage that has been widely shared, with visitors making their way into the hills on weekends to see it in person. Pali has drawn a similar crowd.At Silkho, the scale of change is harder to capture in a single frame. A long stretch of water runs through a broad rocky depression, the characteristic grey-orange Aravali rock rising on either side. Slopes that usually carry little more than scrub and bare stone are thickly covered in new green growth.At Khod Basai, a check dam built by the forest department this March — constructed precisely for this moment — has filled to capacity. Water is spilling over the edge in a steady sheet, following the natural slope of the terrain towards the KMP corridor. What is striking is not just the structure but what follows it: the water does not vanish. It travels, finding old channels and continuing downstream.At Gairatpur Bas, the scene is quieter. Water has gathered in a broad, still pool at Raisena Baba Bilasiya, held against a masonry structure, with rocky slopes rising around it.At Ankhir, near Parson Mandir on the Faridabad face of the range, a stream runs through a wooded ravine, breaking over several layers of dark exposed rock before gathering in a natural pool at the base.At Sohna Mandawar-Neel Kund and Kotla in Nuh, seasonal watercourses that spent the summer as dry, rocky channels are carrying water again, moving through the folds of the terrain and collecting in depressions before draining further downhill.The waterfalls are the part that gets shared — the part that brings people out on Sunday mornings. But for the officials who have worked in these hills through the dry months, the more important story is what happens to the water after the spectacle ends.“The purpose of these structures is to slow down the runoff and retain water in the Aravali catchment,” Gurgaon chief conservator of forests Subhash Yadav told TOI. “It gives the water more time to percolate and recharge the groundwater, while also helping maintain water availability for vegetation and wildlife.”The check dams at Gairatpur Bas and Khod Basai were both built this March, ahead of the monsoon, as part of that effort. The logic is straightforward: rain on rocky Aravali terrain moves fast, and without structures to interrupt it, the water rushes off the slopes and is gone. With them, it pauses, pools, and slowly works its way into the fractured rock below.“The Aravali slopes feed a network of seasonal channels,” said Sunil Harsana, an ecologist who has worked in the region. “When rain comes heavily, water moves rapidly down the rocky terrain. Check dams and other water-conservation structures interrupt that flow, creating temporary storage before excess water continues downstream.”For a few weeks at least, the oldest mountain range in the subcontinent is reminding the cities at its edge that it is not just scenery. The rains will pass, and the waterfalls will go with them — but in the fractured rock beneath, in the slowly recharging aquifers and the thickening roots of new vegetation, something of this monsoon will stay behind.
