Park unfit for Kurinji tourists

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: 2018 is said to be the year there will be an outburst of Kurinji flowers across an endless swathe of Western Ghats, but an official accountability study has found that the Eravikulam National Park, which hosts the Kurinji, is woefully short of funds to tackle the im-minent spurt in tourists. 

Basic amenities like drinking water and toilets have to be created before the Kurinji season starts. The area does not even boast of a medical aid post. But instead of toilets or medical aid posts, the DFO quarters at the Park has got a car porch last fiscal. Fabrication work was also carried out at the backyard of the building. 

“It was not forest work, but civil works that were dominant in the national parks,” said the report on Concurrent Evaluation and Monitoring of Schemes (CEMS) 2017-18, prepared by the finance department.

Curiously, the CEMS report said that the state’s allotment during the 2017-18 fiscal was “very low” when compared to previous fiscals, a consequence of the belt-tightening put in place by finance minister T.M. Thomas Isaac. Even the little that was earmarked for parks was being utilised for less important activities like sprucing up the buildings of forest officials, and the paving of interlocking blocks in front of the officers’ quarters at Munnar. What is urgently required is water for the Amenity Centre and toilets of Rajamala tourism zone, especially because of the inevitable rush of tourists from July this year. The only provision for getting water to this site was from Naikolly thodu. The CEMS report has called for the immediate completion of a water retaining structure to transport water from the ‘thodu’.

Besides setting up toilet facilities and a medical aid post, the CEMS report has also directed the Park authorities to prevent the dumping of plastic wastes in the premises of Eravikulam National Park, which may lead to the death of endangered animals like Nilgiri Tahr. It has also instructed the Forest Department to release funds to the National Parks in the first half of the first quarter of the financial year itself.