Renewed bid for UN heritage status

With the change in political guard in Karnataka, India will make a renewed effort to enlist 39 sites in Western Ghats as world heritage site next year.

Updated on: Aug 2, 2011, 01:58:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With the change in political guard in Karnataka, India will make a renewed effort to enlist 39 sites in Western Ghats a world heritage site next year.

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) had in June refused to give world heritage status to these sites as the Karnataka government had withdrawn its no-objection certificate to India's richest bio-diverse region for granting the status.

The UNESCO requires no objection as granting heritage status means restrictions on lot a commercial activities including mining, which has been rampant in Western Ghats, which extends into three other states Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

Of the 39 sites, 10 are in Karnataka. The state cabinet decided to withdraw the NOC on the grounds that granting heritage status will mean adverse impact on livelihood avenues of the poor living in western ghats and hamper the socio-economic growth of the region.

A week before the decision, then environment minister Jairam Ramesh had announced that western ghats will be declared a no go area for mining once its gets the status. The region is home for a large number of good quality mineral ores.

This had apparently prompted the state government to withdraw its NOC even though a team of experts from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had done a field verification study of the western ghats dossier submitted by India.

After chief minister BS Yeddyruppa resignation following his name in Lokayukta Santosh Hedge report, the environment ministry is hopeful of convincing the new regime to support its campaign for getting the status for western ghats.

We will renew effort so that western ghats gets heritage status by next year, a senior environment ministry official said.

The ministry officials also said that they would be briefing the new environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan and will request her to pursue the issue with new Karnataka government.

India's campaign for western ghats had received a massive support from international community at a recent UNESCO meeting in Paris.

Australia, Bahrain, Barbados, Cambodia, China, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and South Africa had supported India's bid but UNESCO decided to take up the case at its next meeting in Bangkok in 2012 because of some adverse comments from IUCN.

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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