Jairam Ramesh, who signed the wildlife tourism policy and put it on the Ministry of Environment's website on June 2, 2011 has reassured everyone saying in effect: "Relax... Its just a draft". The point is, why did we need to sit so often, as such huge tax-payers expense, to discuss things in such details, spend hours on minutiae, if suddenly, almost overnight, only bits and pieces of six months of deliberations are slapped together carelessly with scraps of unintelligible, unimplementable, never discussed by the Committee-set-up-for-the-purpose, ideas such as stop all tourism in most of India's national parks and sanctuaries? Quixotic. Once India's green hope, it looks like Jairam is going to leave behind a legacy of a fallen-between-two-stools-hero who wanted to do the right thing, but was tripped by forces beyond his ken.
Visit this page on the site to read the full cover story. It also has links to other relevant articles on the vital issue of wildlife tourism.
http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5858:wildlife-tourism-can-india-turn-it-into-a-conservation-tool&catid=110:home-page
