Cess on wildlife tourism on cards

If the environment ministry have its way, tourist facilities around 600 protected areas including tiger reserves will have to pay an unspecified cess on their turnover to sustain conservation and local livelihood development from January 2012.

Updated on: Jun 3, 2011, 24:02:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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If the environment ministry have its way, tourist facilities around 600 protected areas including tiger reserves will have to pay an unspecified cess on their turnover to sustain conservation and local livelihood development from January 2012.

The new draft eco-tourism guidelines are based on recommendations of a seven member government committee, whose member Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary magazine has questioned its implementability in a letter to environment minister Jairam Ramesh.

“Basically what was finally put into the draft was at variance from my perception of the discussions and understanding we had. Also the guidelines are un-implementable in their current form,” Sahgal told HT in an email response.

The guidelines said that the state governments should levy “local conservation cess” as a percentage of the turnover on all privately run tourist facilities within five kms of the protected areas and the money should be deposited in a special protected area management fund.

The fund can be used only for conservation and local livelihood development with an aim of ensuring local community participation in protecting wildlife and sharing of monetary benefits.

Once the guidelines are notified, all major hotel chains having tourist facilities around popular tiger reserves such as Corbett National Park, Ranthambore Tiger Reserve and Kanha Tiger Reserve will have to pay a cess.

“Adequate provisions must be made to ensure that ecotourism does not get relegated to purely high-end exclusive tourism leaving out local communities,” the guidelines state, adding that the first beneficiaries should be local people.

The guidelines also say that half of the energy requirement should come from renewable source and the vehicles used by tour operators should run on eco friendly fuel. It also imposes a ban on construction of tourism facilities on forestland and says financial incentive should be provided to convert revenue land outside the protected areas as forestland.

Such a move may impact number of private resorts that have come up in the green buffer zone of the Corbett, which as per government record is revenue land. Revenue land is under administrative control district collector whereas forestland is managed by district forest officer. It also gives powers to the state governments to impose restrictions on infrastructure in close proximity of tiger reserves or national parks.

For regulating tourism, the ministry has recommended a two tier structure --- a state level steering committee under Chief Minister and a district level advisory body with district collector as chairperson.

The ministry has given time till December 31, 2011 to the state governments to constitute various committees and create the fund so that the guidelines become applicable from January 2012.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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