New community driven tourism guidelines for 600 wildlife areas prescribed

Not just the tourism operators around India’s 600 protected areas and pilgrimage places inside forests will have to pay 10 % as eco-tax, they will have to comply with new green rules to run business.

Updated on: Jul 13, 2012, 01:21:36 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Not just the tourism operators around India’s 600 protected areas and pilgrimage places inside forests will have to pay 10 % as eco-tax, they will have to comply with new green rules to run business.

The Environment ministry this week submitted detailed guidelines for ecotourism in and around protected areas in the Supreme Court stating it will encourage “community based” and “community driven” ecotourism. The guidelines are in response to a Public Interest Litigation filed by Madhya Pradesh based RTI activist Ajay Dubey seeking prohibition of tourism inside tiger reserves.

Although the ministry has not suggested banning of tourism, it admitted that there has been mushrooming of tourist facilities around wildlife sanctuaries and parks which leading to “exploitation, degradation, disturbance and misuse of fragile ecosystems”.

As a protective measure, the ministry’ National Tiger Conservation Authority has prescribed the zone for the community based tourism activity within core-critical wildlife areas including tiger reserves. It is 10 % of core area, which is less than 500 sq kms and 20 % for others. The guidelines also make demarcation of core and buffer zones mandatory for each protected area.

To prevent further damage to ecosystems, the ministry wants the state governments to levy a minimum tax of 10 of the turnover on all tourism facilities within five kilometers of the protected area, which will have to be spent for conservation measures and community empowerment.

The tourism establishment falling within five kms of the protected area will have to be phased out in the next five years. Till they are phased out, they will have to comply with noise pollution regulations, they will not be allowed to dispose waste around protected areas and will have put a check on number of vehicles entering protected areas.

As general policy guidelines, each tourism facility will have to source 50 % of energy from renewable sources including wind, solar and biogas and will not be allowed to use wood, except for camp fires. Visit to temples inside forests should be allowed only on certain days in the year and in a controlled manner, the guidelines say.

The ministry has also provides for a state-level monitoring agency to ensure that the guidelines are implemented. The state level steering committee will need to have representatives of local communities, forest dwellers that live in and around these protected areas and representatives of civil society organizations.

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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