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Effective Management of Protected Areas Uttarakhand
S.M.A.KAZMI
She made the flowers bloom again in the Valley of Flowers. As director of the Nanda Devi Biosphere from 2002 to 2005, of which the Valley of Flowers is the buffer zone, Jyotsna Sitling cleared the garbage out with the help of the local community.
She and her colleague A.K. Banerjee, then DFO of Joshimath, not only cleaned up the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, a world heritage site, they also evolved a democratic, community based, sustainable, ecologically friendly programme for the locals to earn their livelihood based on tourism.
The 19-km stretch from Govindghat to Hemkund Sahib, the famous Sikh shrine, near the Valley of Flowers was lined with dhabas and the garbage spilled over to the Valley. Sitling cleared the area of many dhabas and with the help of the local community, cleaned up the Valley. The litter gone, many species like inula, anemone and potentilla are back.
Sitling involved the locals, particularly women, in collecting 44 tonne of garbage accumulated over the year in Nanda Devi.
“Initially it was difficult to convince people who were hostile to the forest bureaucracy but finally interaction with the community and incentives, made it possible,” says Sitling, currently Director of the Livelihood Programme for the Himalayas. The eco-development committee (EDC) that she set up, paid people Rs 1,000 a month to collect garbage —with additional incentive of Rs 5 per garbage bag.
“It was difficult for us to even mange sacks to collect the garbage. Sacks worth Rs.1.5 lakh were bought to store the garbage which kept on accumulating as our Operation Clean-up caught momentum,” says Banerjee, who supervised the operation.
Nanda Devi and the Valley of Flowers had a different set of problems. After being ravaged and littered for years by mountaineering expeditions, entry was banned in the Nanda Devi National Park in 1982. The ban took away livelihood opportunities from the locals. On the other hand, the tourism overdrive in its buffer zone, Valley of Flowers National Park, destroyed many of its plants.
When the Nanda Devi National Park opened to mountaineers again in 2003, Sitling involved the locals. About 32 trek routes were identified, developed and popularised. More than 371 trekking teams have been helped by 263 guides trained under this initiative.
Meanwhile, in the Valley of Flowers, Sitling persuaded locals to reduce the number of dhabas from over 400 to 76.
A total of 208.6 tonnes of bio-degradable and plastics were removed by the locals in the area for recycling between 2003 and 2006.
“Besides building a successful sustainable model, another major achievement was setting up a plastic densification plant in private-public sector at Srinagar (Garhwal) to recycle plastic waste being accumulated in the Himalayas,” says Banerjee, now DFO, Mussoorie.

editor@expressindia.com

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