Following relaxations by the Rajasthan Govt, tourists make a beeline to Mount Abu.
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| Welcome to the Abode of Gods |
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| MOUNT ABU GOOGLE WORLD |
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Scenic points to visit
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Mount Abu is a popular weekend spot for tourists from Gujarat. With a drop in the number of cases, and the unlock put into effect last month, the tourist rush to this oasis has gone through the roof! Throughout the week, hordes of tourists drove up to visit Abu, with an estimate of over 65000 people visiting on an average weekend getaway.
The road leading up to Mount Abu sees impatient traffic jams because of the overwhelming number of vehicles. They also made it victim to mass litter with empty beer bottles, plastic water bottles, empty snack packaging, and other grim litter associated with irresponsible tourism. With the growing waste attributed to the tourism industry, they have not left Mount Abu undefiled. All this adds to the strain on wildlife and the environment.
What about the principal scientific advisor to the prime minister, who clearly stated that a third wave is inevitable and that the exact time of its advent cannot be FORECAST? Although the Government has called on the population, at large, to follow the pandemic protocol strictly, there is such a universal indifference to laws and regulations in that regard.
The thousands of tourists in Mount Abu flout all mandatory safety precautions daily. It mostly comes across as unruly children let loose in the wild. The lessons learnt from the devastating second wave, only a short while ago, which caused untold panic throughout the country, seem to have faded away, leaving an ideal ground for the virus to raise its head once again.
Can we prevent the #ThirdWave with such insolence?
Will our vaccinations be effective against new variant strains?
Like all other hill stations that depend on tourism, will Abu survive another onslaught of lockdowns?
We require tourism, but while the industry creates the problems, it also needs to provide solutions. There is an immediate need to preserve what we have in this gracious oasis of ours. We cannot let tourism thrive at the cost of disturbing the fragile ecological balance. There has to be a way of bringing a collective consciousness into play.
A campaign in July 2019, Clean up Nakki Lake (under Ravindra Goswami, the sub-divisional magistrate), yielded over 10 to 12 tons of garbage. Can one believe that guests visiting this beautiful lake would be so uncaring for the environment that they would make it the graveyard of beer bottles? They also hoisted four trolleys of discarded beer bottles out from the lake. I’m making this point only because the other day I visited Mini Nikki Lane and the Lower Khodra dam and witnessed this menace first-hand. There were beer bottles thrown all around; many even pitched into the water. I would also like to mention a recent video that circulated, which showed the deplorable condition of the Polo Grounds. In the video, I saw large numbers of vehicles parked, and tourists were thoughtlessly littering the ground with beer bottles and other trash items. I have linked the same at the end of this blog.
There is a constant threat of automobile pollution, jammed roads, not designed to accommodate such vehicle inflow, rampant littering of non-biodegradable material, and plastic waste too. With these looming problems, there is an impending threat in terms of local resources too, especially water. Regular monitoring of the few water bodies we have here is necessary, and the Administration should contemplate imposing penalties for polluting them. To stop the dumping of beer bottles in our town and its environment, we need strict laws.
If we address these concerns one at a time, perhaps in the coming years we will still have something for these visitors to see and appreciate.
Mount Abu Polo Grounds is a pathetic state
Personal Memories of Polo Grounds
