Sounding alarm against a plan to start a helicopter service inside the forests of Sundarban islands, eminent wildlife conservationist Belinda Wright has warned that this may force the Royal Bengal Tigers to migrate to the Bangladesh side.
"I think large-scale high-end tourism would be a complete disaster in the Sundarbans. It will be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. And you will probably have all the tigers in the Indian side migrating to Bangladesh," Wright said at an event here.
More than two-thirds of the Sundarbans lie on the Bangladesh side.
To give fresh boost to tourism, the West Bengal Tourism department has a plan to start a chopper service to the mangrove forests of Sundarbans, a three-hour drive away from Kolkata.
Famed for its tigers and scenic beauty, the UNESCO World Heritage site is an archipelago of islands crisscrossed by a complex network of rivers, creeks and tidal rivulets.
"Sundarbans is a very delicate habitat and you can only have a certain amount of tourism. The existing tourism is low-scale but high-volume. Any tourism in the core area would be a disaster," the New Delhi-based conservationist, who heads the Wildlife Protection Society of India, warned.
She also cautioned that the islands has a very dynamic weather system which will act as a deterrent for large flow of tourists.
Even in other tiger reserves of the country, Wright said tourism activities are not done the proper way.
"At the moment there is a frenzy, but we need to bring in some order in tourism activities. And that order should come from within the tourism industry," she said.
To restrict poaching of tigers, Wright stressed on the need to find a way to reduce the demand of dead tigers from China who use it in various traditional medicines.
"I have led four teams to China, but they are not interested," she said.
She described tiger as the "leading conservationist" in India - a term she used to explain that when a 1000-square-km area is set aside as a tiger reserve it automatically gives space to so many other species to reside.
