Sunday, December 24, 2006

i chanced upon an article in economic times regarding eco tourism with a comment from ramesh as follows:

Tiger Ramesh, CEO of Wilderness Resorts, says, "Eco-tourism is registering 35% growth annually in India. It is the fastest growing subset in the tourism industry and is set to become a Rs 1,000 crore industry soon."

mr.ramesh is obviously talking about the thriving tourism and not eco tourism. eco tourism, for me, is one which has to be done not with crores-of-rupee-profits in mind but with conservation of natural resources, participation of local people, benefits to forests and local people, involvement of strong regulatory mechanism so that in name of tourism core forest areas are not violated.

and not coincidentally, mr.ramesh is facing issues with his pet eco tourism project near bandipur.

and the central empowered committe has recently visited the place to see what's going on since the place where ramesh plans to put his resort is a vital elephant corridor also.

and funnily ramesh quotes as follows.
Subjective opinions of environmentalists and NGOs hampering the category

eco tourism is already running amok in places like ranthambore. rather than converting core and vital forests into eco tourist zones, in name of tourism dollars/rupees, the govt should work with environmentalists and renowned forest experts first to form a strong policy rather than with industry which will always want to open up even core forests in name of tourism.

below are 2 images of the single tusker of bandipur which i snapped when i went with the forest department conducted tour on the edges of bandipur.


1 Comments:

At 5:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just for your information, after the Central Empowered Committee inspected the Bandipur site, they cleared the project on 2nd April 2007. The resort can be constructed. The promoters proved that the complaint was erroneous and was well outside the forest in private land. The complaint filed by Belinda Wright was DISMISSED.

 

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