Carrying Capacity of Kaziranga

Kaziranga National Park (KNP) registering a record footfall of foreign tourists is a reflection of the growing popularity of the iconic tourism site across the globe. The national park recording a 127 per cent rise in foreign tourist footfall compared to the tourism season’s corresponding period last year is also indicative of the rising revenue earning. The national park was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1985 for being the world’s major stronghold of the Indian one-horned rhino, having the single largest population of this species and also providing habitat for a number of globally threatened species, including the tiger, Asian elephant, wild water buffalo, gaur, eastern swamp deer, sambar deer, hog deer, capped langur, hoolock gibbon and sloth bear. The tourism success story of rising footfall of tourists, domestic as well as foreign, comes with a reminder for dynamic evaluation of its tourist carrying capacity to decide a threshold limit to conserve its ecological integrity. Rising footfall has been facilitated by increasing numbers of tourist accommodations and growth in transport vehicles to cater to increasing demand for jeep safaris inside the park as well as bringing tourists to the iconic site. The ‘Environmental Assessment of Tourism in the Indian Himalayan Region’, a report prepared by the G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment and submitted to the National Green Tribunal by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in compliance with an NGT order, highlighted the intricacies of balancing tourism growth with conservation of natural ecosystems in the Himalayan region, including the northeast region. The report pointed out that while tourism is contributing to the economy, it needs to go hand in hand with conservation of the environment and preservation of ecosystem services. There need to be environmental management plans specific to tourism at micro levels. These action plans could define different tourism hot spots and thereby environmental pressure points, it adds. The report underscores the necessity of fully executing all National Acts, Guidelines, and Regulations pertaining to environmental protection and sustainable resource use and regular air and water quality monitoring in urban as well as rural areas for assessing the impact of tourism on these environmental components. It recommended conducting a study of tourism activity on biodiversity, socio-cultural systems and related components and increasing the capacity of authorities working in the tourism industry and other relevant departments as well as environmental awareness among travellers and locals involved in tourism about ethical and environmentally friendly travel. Kaziranga Park areas have witnessed an increase in the number of hotels, tourist lodges, and homestays along the National Highway-715 along its southern boundary.  It has become essential to undertake a comprehensive review of the solid and liquid waste management of the national park to ensure that increasing volumes of waste driven by increases in tourist arrivals and accommodation are not posing any pollution threat to the waterbodies and other natural ecosystems. Plastic pollution is another area of concern that warrants urgent attention by the park authorities to ensure that growth in tourism is not leading to the dumping of plastic water bottles and plastic carry bags within the park areas. All protected areas of the country were declared as “plastic-free zones” in 2018. While park authorities strictly enforce this restriction at the entry point of all the ranges in which tourists are allowed to undertake a jeep safari or elephant safari, dumping of plastic bottles and food wrappers along the national highway and near some tourist accommodation facilities has become a serious threat to its fragile ecology. The ideal solution to curb plastic pollution is sensitising tour and travel operators, hotels, lodges and homestay owners to ensure that no tourist brings any Single Use Plastic (SUP) items to Kaziranga and that they bring their reusable water bottles and refrain from dumping any SUP item, even if they have brought it with them. Such regulation can be effective only when the sale of plastic water bottles is also strictly prohibited in hotels and other tourist accommodation as well as in marketplaces. Light pollution in Kaziranga due to increasing lighting arrangements at tourist accommodations is another area of concern, as artificial light seriously affects nocturnal species and adversely affects the movement of wildlife along animal corridors, and this problem warrants urgent attention and mitigation measures. It must be remembered that growth in tourist footfall increases the scale and magnitude of these challenges and calls for a proportionate mitigation mechanism before the park ecology suffers irreversible damage, posing an existential threat to its biodiversity. The iconic site gaining more popularity among global tourism destinations is certainly reflective of the success story of the conservation of unique wildlife, biodiversity and ecosystems by the park authorities, but not allowing the environmental pollution to become the elephant in the room remains the bigger challenge. Assessing the optimal tourism carrying capacity of Kaziranga is vital for the sustainability of tourism activities in the park.