India’s EcoLogical Tourism

Point Blank

By Hugh & Colleen Gantzer

Yes, we are talking about Eco-tourism. So why have we italicised Logical? Because, on the face of it, it doesn’t seem logical for a country of a billion people to care about its wild creatures. “Since your citizens exert so much pressure on the land, why are you bothering about your wildlife? A cynical German asked us in Malaysia last year. We were in the Orang Utang Rehabilitation Centre in Sabah where tourism earnings help these, once captive, intelligent apes to relearn how to live in the wild.

This is the essence of Eco-tourism. We define it as an activity that reduces the impact of the visitor on the environment to the lowest level.

In spite of the fact that we, in India, have many people and, therefore, so many more potential visitors, we have achieved more in Eco-tourism than most other nations. Consider these facts:

• Our wild creatures lead protected lives in 154,826.26 square kilometres of our land.
• This is divided into 493 wildlife sanctuaries and 89 national parks dotted all over our varied terrain from the Himalayas to the deserts, through dense rain forests, jungles of thorn-scrub, and the great tidal swamps of the Sunderbans, to the salt flats of the Rann of Kutch and the Coral Gardens of the Andamans.
• We have rescued from the virtual edge of extinction, the Asiatic Lion and the Greater Indian One-horned Rhinoceros. You can encounter the great cats in the forests of Gujarat’s Gir; and see Rhinos grazing in the swamps of Assam’s Kaziranga. We have cosseted these endangered species so well that we have had to relocate them to prevent overcrowding. These, incidentally, were the prototypes of the animals supporting the Royal Coat of Arms of Britain!
• Quite apart from Panthera Leo and Rhinoceros Unicomis, to give them their official titles, the magnificent Swamp Deer almost vanished from this world. Our people stepped in just in time. Visitors can now see herds of the northern sub-species in the Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, and the southern ones in Madhya Pradesh’s Kahna National Park.
• Then there’s the success of ‘Project Tiger’ but for which these regal animals would have been confined to zoos and circuses. The battle for the survival of the tiger has still not been won because of the South-East and East Asian demand for tiger meat, bones, fat and organs but we believe that we’ve managed to stem the tide.
• We could go on and talk about the herds of Indian Wild Asses that now thunder across the cement-hard flats of Dhrangadhra; the Nilgiri Tahr unique to our land in the Eravikulam Reserve in Tamil Nadu; the three species of Crocodiles saved from the ravages of the leather goods industry of Europe, Japan and America and now being bred and restocked in the wild; but we’ve made our point. In spite of our other problems, we still protect our ecology very jealously.

All our 582 protected areas are funded by both the state and earnings from visitors. They are eco-tourism schemes in the strictest sense of the word. We do, however, go much further than this. In the state of Karnataka, the forest department set up its Jungle Lodges and Resorts devoted exclusively to eco-tourism. Its jeep safaris, carrying tourists through the jungles, have been so successful that poachers prefer to shun the forests in which Jungle Lodges operates. Well-equipped gangs of wildlife marauders feel they can tackle forest guards but they certainly can’t take the risk of jeep-loads of vigilant tourists. The animals seem to realise that tourists are not a threat. They stop and stare at them for a moment, and then resume their activities unperturbed. This, in turn, sensitises visitors. The natural balance between man and nature becomes stronger.

It isn’t only in our great wilderness, however, that India is a torch-bearer in eco-tourism. In the great urban sprawl of Mumbai, once known as Bombay, there is a world-renowned eco-tourism operation. The Orchid hotel has shown its concern for the environment in everything from the its cement and in its concrete, through its insistence on recycled and reprocessed cotton and rubber wood, its zero garbage output, to its recycling of all waste water and its involving its guests by installing an ‘eco-button’ which allows a voluntary two per cent increase in the air-conditioning temperature. The Orchid, today, holds the highest number of environment awards won by any hotel in the world. It also claims to be the only hotel to hold both the Ecotel and ISO 14001 certification.

It may not be logical for a country of one billion people to be so concerned about the ecology. But then if we aren’t how can we expect others to follow suit? That’s EcoLogical isn’t it?