While the majority of travellers to these realms remained indifferent, the sight of garbage littering the mountain sides disturbed at least one group of mountain lovers enough for them to consider mixing trekking with a clean-up of the mountains. The initiative was spearheaded by a man who has 14 Himalayan expeditions to this credit the famous mountaineer M.S. Kohli.

Kohli had formed theHimalayan Environment Trust and involved stalwarts like Edmund Hilary and Reinhold Messner in it. It was this organisation that began the Gangotri Conservation Project as a pilot project with the express intention of cleaning up the mountains.

The results have been quite impressive. In fact it has become a model that can be replicated at all the hill stations located in the Himalayas. The message it sent out was loud and clear: there is a solution to the vexed issue of mountain garbage with a little bit of public involvement and awareness.

In Delhi, the Ministry of Tourism is marketing next year as the `Explore India' year and for the first time the authorities seem to have realised the importance of establishing the connection between conservation and adventure tourism.

The third International Tourism Expo and Mart, which will be held in Delhi in January, will have an international conference on the Himalayan environment. Among those participating will be international and domestic tour operators,tourism promotion organisations, travel agents, public sector organisations and adventure tour operators.

Given the mind-boggling statistics trotted out by the authorities, the tourist traffic to the Himalayas have registered handsome increases. Sadly, though, there is no code of conduct which is followed by the 0.5 million tourists who trek there every year.

There are nearly two lakh tour operators who arrange trips for schoolchildren and youth, then there are the youth groups and the tourist groups from the metros. Take the rush heading for the Vaishno Devi shrine every year an estimated one lakh people. Another 250,000 visit Gangotri every season. Forget a garbage management plan, some of these regions do not even have dustbins!

All these years, the Central and state governments have been totally apathetic to this situation. The one exception perhaps was Shimla, where the local government took the lead and invited the Delhi-based NGO, Vatavaran, to study its environs and recommend ways to clean up.The visiting group soon realised that things were very seriously wrong here. There were no kabadis in the town and plastic cans and bottles were selling at half the price that they are sold in Delhi. The result was that everybody used and discarded them and the garbage was just piling up and choking the town.

Every year, an estimated 3,000 metric tonnes of garbage was being generated. Among the suggestions made was introducing a garbage tax for tourists, recycling non-biodegradable waste and encouraging composting.

But mountain slopes make composting and landfilling difficult, so the other alternative was to bring the garbage down to the plains. In 1991, 100 students had come from New Zealand to come and clean the slopes of Himalayas. Says Kohli, ``We realised that with the same amount of money that was spent to transport them from New Zealand, we could take 10,000 of our students up there to do the job.'' This was how the idea of taking expeditions from Indian cities started.

The trekkers would go upto Gangotri and pick up garbage which was to be eventually recycled in Uttarkashi. To date, 21 tonnes of garbage has been collected from the Gangotri region with each person carrying as much as 20 kg on his or her way back from the mountains.

Slowly locals started getting involved in the programme. Local mountaineers from Uttarkashi carried out garbage clearance operations from Tapovan, Nandanvan, Bhagirathi and the Chaukhamba base camp during the first year of the operation in 1995. In the second year, various mountaineering groups from as far as Calcutta began to get involved. Slowly the local government started getting fully involved with the district magistrate of Uttarkashi himself organising a cleaning campaign. Later the Sikh battalion also did their bit to make this unique battle a successful one.

There were some significant spin-offs from the experiment. The Bhojpatra (birch) plantations, typical of the area, were fast disappearing after being used for providing firewood and makeshift dhabas forthe tourists en route to Gaumukh. A nursery of these trees was started in 1996 to compensate for those that had been felled. Also, a design for pre-fabricated dhabas was designed and 15 of them set up, resulting in saving 300 metric tonnes of Bhojpatra every year. LPG connections were provided to dhabas, ashrams and guest houses to reduce local dependence on firewood and an incinerator was also set-up to burn bio-degradable waste.

But what was by far the biggest achievement of the project was that it led to the formulation of the Himalayan Code of Conduct displayed at every entry point from Gangotri to Gaumukh. For the first time, detailed directions were spelt out for all tourists to follow.

When a team of experts visited the area to assess the success of the Gangotri Conservation Project, they recommended that it should continue to remain in operation until the year 2001, considering the significant gains that had been made. Which only goes to show how a small initiative taken up by a few committedpeople can galvanise the entire government and administrative machinery.