Locals oppose heritage tag for Himalayan park

Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP), which is not accessible by road and source to four rivers, may soon get the world heritage tag despite opposition by local NGOs, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Dec 26, 2012, 02:27:17 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Maslandapur

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Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP), which is not accessible by road and source to four rivers, may soon get the world heritage tag despite opposition by local NGOs.

The park, with its eco-zones sprawls over 1,171 square km in the Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh, has dense forest of walnut and oak.

A gateway to beautiful valleys of Dhel and Rolla, it home to most of the endangered animal and bird species in the Himalayas.

Reaching the park is an uphill trek of 15km and it will remain so if the park gets the prestigious heritage status. “No road will be built,” the government has assured in its submission to the United Nations body.

A team of experts from International Union for Conservation and Nature (IUCN) on behalf of UNESCO recently visited the park and met local NGOs including Himalayan Niti, Sahara, and Friends of Tirthan near Banjar, who wanted alternative source of income for locals before the park gets the status.

“The (world heritage) tag should not mean depriving locals of their source of livelihood,” said Rajendra Chauhan of NGO Sahara.

Sanjeeva Pandey, an IFS officer, who has formed a group — friends of GHNP— says that number of community based approaches were under implementation for around 1,600 people. “Locals are reaping the benefits of eco-tourism,” he said.

The IUCN team led by Dr Graeme Worboys was impressed with the scientific resource the park could provide to study impacts of unique biodiversity of the region. The park is source of four rivers and has glaciers from 1,700 -6,100 metres.

“Its associated protected areas include evidence of past and current glaciation,” the government’s submission to UN says.

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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