Heavy rush of tourists affects Triund’s fragile ecology

Lalit Mohan

Tribune News Service

Dharamsala, June 18

Being peak tourist season, there was a heavy rush of trekkers to the world famous trekking site Triund.

Sources said these days about 1,000 tourists were trekking up to Triund daily. Hundreds of them stay back there for the night. However, such a huge rush of tourists at an ecologically fragile location is causing concern among environmentalists.

Mukesh, a trekker, said a large numbers of tents had been put up to house tourists coming to Triund. However, there were no sanitation facilities in tents and people were using natural sources of water in the region for sanitation and other purposes. This was causing irreparable damage to the fragile ecology of the area.

The area where the Triund summit is located falls in the reserve forest area. The only legal place to stay at the summit was a forest rest house constructed during the British times having four rooms. Still people have put up a large number of tents illegally in the area around the forest rest house that facilitates the stay of trekkers and thus became a source of deposition of solid and biological waste in the area.

Facilitating their stay in the area was causing damage to the ecology, said Sania, a foreign tourist.

Last year then Kangra Deputy Commissioner Ritesh Chauhan had taken initiatives to check the numbers of tourists visiting Triund summit every day. The administration had decided to cap the number of trekkers visiting the Triund summit to just 500. Tourists also had to registered at the Galu Mata Temple and declare solid waste they were taking to Triund. However, all these checks have gone haywire now and there was hardly any check on tourists going to the Triund summit now.

Another problem that the locals are expressing regarding unregulated tourist flow to Triund is that most of water sources from where water was being supplied to McLeodganj and Dharamsala areas come from Triund.

Some guest houses have come up close to the Triund summit despite the fact that most of the area there was reserved forest area. Hackles were raised last year when a local had got registered a land in his name right at the Triund summit. Later, inquires revealed that revenue record had been tampered with to register forest land in the name of a private person.

Forest officials said there might be many more lands around the summit that had been illegally transferred in revenue papers in the name of private individuals, otherwise there was no way guest houses could have come up near the Triund summit that was a reserve forest land.