A Fervent Plea To The Foresters

Kuppalli, the birthplace of the great Kannada writer Kuvempu is a treat to the aesthetic senses. Kuvempu’s ancestral home, Kavimane, is carefully preserved and tastefully maintained. When we reach the popular tourist spot in the evening, there is a small crowd of enthusiasts going around the place. The setting is picturesque in the midst of Western Ghats. Surprisingly and thankfully, the surroundings are neat. Just outside the premises of Kavimane, a small canteen is dishing out bajjis but I don’t see any discarded plastic cups or plates. Of course, the place is not spotless but it passes the Swachch Bharat test handsomely.

Kavimane at Kuppallai

It is getting late for the sunset and we hurry to the sunset point near Agumbe town. ‘Will it be crowded’, I ask the driver. ’Of course’, he replies, ‘and today is Saturday’.  When we are five kilo metres away from the point, I see the sun dipping quickly behind a haze of mountains in a red ball. I am not disappointed as I have been to the place before, a good two decades back, just about the time when the location was popularized by the famous Rajkumar starrer ‘Aakasmika’.

The now famous sunset point is close to a forest check post. As we near the gate I see a virtual gridlock of vehicles ahead of us. The show is over and people are heading to their next destination. We are in fact caught in a traffic jam. The driver asks us to get down near a small series of steps that would lead us to a vantage point. The sunset would have looked lovely from here and I find the scenery-a panorama of forested landscape-enchanting. But distractingly, right below me is a sea of vehicles parked haphazardly all over the road. School buses, taxis, private cars, jeeps, buses with children on excursions-not less than 300-400 vehicles and a crowd of 2000-3000. And litter everywhere in all colours and forms. It is not out of place to mention here that the sunset point of Agumbe falls inside ‘Someshwara Wildlife Sanctuary’.

                     Scenes at the Sunset Point, Agumbe

People have every right to visit the places they want to and nobody should have problem with that. With increasing education, income and awareness more and more people are moving out and exploring new destinations and the tourist places are getting crowded. For the city dwellers, even a small stream or a mini-waterfall near the road in the countryside becomes a pit stop. Just like in the West, youngsters hit the roads on Saturday mornings and return to their city homes on Sunday nights with wonderful stories to share and flash drive full of pictures. Eco tourism is the in thing and you find hundreds of tour and trek organizers online. If there is one thing that is common for most of the travelling and tourism in India, that is forests. A vast majority of our treks, hikes, walks, drives, camps, visits, homestays, darshans, homages, campfires, safaris affect the forests either directly or indirectly. Sadly, the ‘eco’ part is missing in most of the tours and if we, the foresters don’t pull up our socks and brace for the challenge, we will have no place to hide when things go beyond redemption.

Kukke Subramanya, the once sleepy temple town in coastal Karnataka, now attracts hundreds of devotees every day and during weekends, thousands. While travelling from Bengaluru, after one crosses Sakleshpur, the landscape turns hilly and forested. The jungle gets denser as one nears Kukke Subramanya, after Gundya. The trail of litter too starts from Sakleshpur. It gets worse after Gundya. One can see people stopping midway for a meal break. A stream nearby comes handy. You can even see people cooking food on the roadside. When the job is done and the groups drive on, evidences in the shape of chips packets, water bottles, chocolate and biscuit wrappers, cigarette packs and not too uncommonly, liquor bottles, are left behind. Most of these areas on either side of the road happen to be reserve forests.

 In the divinely beautiful and serene Pangong lake, I have fished out an Lays packet while an army officer and his family was served juice and snacks right at the edge of the lake. In the wonderfully desolate Changthang grasslands and all along the Leh-Pangong route, one is sure to get distressed seeing the amount of litter thrown by the careless tourists. When I went to Ooty four years ago, I was heartbroken by the scene of utter carnage of filth unleashed by tourists in and around the town. The most abominable stretches of litter were to be seen in forest areas in the outskirts of Ooty. Broken beer bottles told a thousand stories of tourist hooliganism and official apathy.

While on a visit to Dehradun recently, I drove along the Mussorie road for a field exercise. Here is what I find on either side of this busy road.

                        On the Dehradun-Mussorie road

Interestingly, it is not that the foresters do not have any powers to streamline and regulate tourism and take action against the offenders using the existing laws. Section 27 (1) puts restriction on the entry of people inside a sanctuary and 27 (4) reads, “No person shall tease or molest any wild animal or litter the grounds or sanctuary”. Again, the Indian Forest Act of 1927 gives ample powers to the foresters to restrict the entry of tourists, regulate their movements and activities in reserved and protected forests. It really beats me why we are not utilizing these provisions.

I am sure that many of you might have observed that of late it has become a common practice to dump waste materials in the forest areas, especially near the towns and small cities. Lorries and mini trucks, pick-up vans silently dump the garbage into the forests, streamlets along the roadsides and speed away. I have seen this phenomenon mostly in and around Mangaluru and also in many parts of Kerala.

                                            Near Mangaluru

We, the foresters crib that the tsunami of developmental agenda is ignoring our concerns and we are easily and regularly overruled. But if we care and more importantly, if we dare, we can contribute immensely to maintain what we have within the realm of our jurisdiction. The domestic tourism industry is growing tremendously every year (the Tourism Ministry’s report for 2014 says ‘the number of Domestic Tourist Visits to all States/UTs is 1282 million and the annual growth rate is 12 % !!) and if we don’t act now to stop our forests from becoming dustbins, we will be held equally responsible just like the reckless tourists. Let us put barricades, restrict, calculate carrying capacity, monitor, educate, publish ads, punish the offenders, put CCTV cameras, shame the litterbugs, anything. Let us do something. Let us not wait for somebody else to do our jobs.