Sunderbans from MCCS Sulagna

World Heritage Site Exchange Program

For the past 02 decades, Help Tourism has been working on several heritage sites in India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. 02 World Heritage Sites have been in core focus, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway area and the Sunderbans Tiger Reserve, because of being under 01 state administration, West Bengal, but extreme in their landscape, alpine in the East Himalaya and the estuarine in the Bay of Bengal sea. This has made the livelihood of the people also extreme in their own way, but most people here live below the poverty line and dependent on the local natural resources. At both places Help Tourism work to create a sense of ownership and pride about their World Heritage Site among the local people.

 

There is a unique program which has been implemented by Help Tourism and the network organizations. The ‘Exchange Program’, which has been carried out for 05 years now between the people of Darjeeling Himalayan Railway area and Sunderbans Tiger Reserve area has shown better understanding for their own sites. The program was started with the Nepali Girls School, one of the oldest schools in Darjeeling run by missionaries for girls from the remote tea garden and forest villages of Darjeeling Hills to have their educational tour to the Sunderbans and interact with the children there, this was followed by the visit of school teachers of various schools from the Sunderbans Tiger Reserve area. Also, a team from the Bali Wildlife and Nature Conservation Society and the Sunderbans Jungle Camp visited the DHR area. The other was the visit of the administrative teachers of Modella Caretaker Centre & School from the DHR area of Siliguri, who also run a DHR Heritage club in school. From their visit, they decided to send their senior students of the school for educational tour to Sunderbans.  

MCC School visits Sunderbans WHS for environment study and community understanding

 

48 students, Class 12 boys and girls, their last few months left in school. After this they will be preparing for a more career based life at graduation level. The school decided on an innovative educational tour, where every student in this tour is connected to the most isolated islands of West Bengal. The 102 islands of Indian Sunderbans, 54 home for humans and 48 territories for the tigers. The legendary islands are now part of the Sunderbans Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site, where both man and tigers live every single day.

This is not an easy task. 47 of the 48 students have no clue of the great network of the Indian Postal Service, though there would be about 10 odd head post office, post offices and sub-post offices around the area they stay in Siliguri or Jalpaiguri. This is probably because of the reason that there is no way that the post offices have any relevance to their day to day life. They have been given the responsibility to connect one child or youth each from the Bali island of Sunderbans, who has no clue of emails or courier, but about 30,000 islanders sharing a post office, the only communication for them with the outside world. This is probably the reason why the celebrity film director from Bengal, Aparna Sen based her film ‘Japanese Wife’ on this island, a story based on pen friends. The whole crew probably spent about 80 days at the Sunderbans Jungle Camp at Bali.

The short excursion of 04 nights ex-Siliguri was focussed on connecting the students to the natural wonders of Sunderbans in the first part and to the people in the second part. The students were a mixture from different subjects, which included Geography, Commerce and Bio-Science. This article will be followed by posts from students of Modella Caretaker Centre and School (MCCS), Siliguri, Class 12 students who had gone on this tour.

So keep following this blog to know more about Sunderbans.

River Karala and Jalpaiguri

Yesterday, when the people of Jalpaiguri Town woke up, they found thousands of dead fishes floating in the river Karala.

I remember a young man from Jalpaiguri, who was then completing his tourism course with North Bengal University, visited my office quite often. He was loud in his comments and proud about his Jalpaiguri town; his regular comment was as follows:

“What River Tames is to London, River Karala is to Jalpaiguri. This is the only city of India, which can be compared with London”.

I had spent a major part of my childhood in Jalpaiguri, the ancestral house of my mother, located next to the Karala River, just opposite to the Jalpaiguri Jail field, a large wooden house, high up on 08 huge Sal  (Shorea) logs, which even withstood the heavy floods of 1968 and 1971. There was a boat which was tied at the river just after a small backyard garden (almost wild) and our favourite place for night picnics. As children, we often explored till the mouth of mighty Teesta River in that boat and sometimes in the opposite direction to the Rajbari (King’s palace). On the opposite bank was the Dinbazaar. Then there was a regular flow in the river and I remember there was atleast 02 community cleaning of the river.

I had no idea where the river originated from, but there were stories from my grandmother that Devi Choudhurani often used this river for her movements. The living river was the proof of the good quality life of the people of Jalpaiguri then. My Grandfather being a freedom fighter of his times, saw good number of friends who were dedicated to the development of Jalpaiguri and her people. There was a living culture for education, health, dance, music and business. I often found it more lively than Siliguri then. With my Grandfather I often visited his friends and relatives at Lataguri, Kathambari, Takdah and sometimes Bhutan. My Grandmother’s father often visited her from Rajsahi in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) with good Simul cotton and sweets. All the journeys had crossing of several rivers and life with livelihood along the rivers.

Gradually with time our connectivity the rivers have almost gone. We just look at it as a line of feel good, but often forget that these water networks still helps to keep the good health of this earth, provides us with the sweet water supply and inturn food for all living beings on land. We often try and create hurdles for free movement of our rivers through dams and ducts, and do not allow the complete flushing out of all pollution from the land. It is time when we have to think beyond beautification of out river banks, building bridges, covering the river banks near cities to built housing colonies and slums and dumping daily household wastes in the rivers (forget industry, corporate and medical wastes). It is time when we have to think that these rivers, however small or big or ugly they may be, they are the mother of our lives.

The Jalpaiguri incident should be a lesson for all of us. Let every town and village take ownership of their rivers and run community programs, regular volunteering programs from the children, to the working class to retired elders, and establish connectivity with their rivers.

Durga Puja with a difference...

Durga Puja, established as the largest carnival of the world, is celebrated globally, and specially in West Bengal in India. This event is marked by the visit of Goddess Durga to her own house, i.e. the earth with her 04 children. Few hundreds of community Pujas are organized and in Kolkata, along with a few cities, the theme of the Puja has become extremely important. My friend Arunava Das from Shantiniketan finds the most meaningful Durga Puja in Kolkata and makes it a point to share with all readers of this blog.

This is the celebration of  Sobhabazar Ahiritola Sarbojanin Durgotsav and they have dedicated their work to Sonabai Rajawar.

Sonabai Rajawar lives at Puputra village in Sarguja district of Chhattisgarh. As she had no child till tenth years of her marriage she had to face regular insults from her husband’s family and fellow women folk of the village. After ten years at last she gave birth to a boy child and started making toys for him using locally available materials like clay, hay and cow dung. Unconsciously she had developed a new style of doll making which somehow caught the eyes of art lovers. For their initiative within some years Sonabai came into limelight and appreciated by the art critiques across the country. President of India honoured her with a special prize not only for unique creativity but also for her exceptional kind of protest against social injustice to housewives of rural India. Now Sonabai Rajawar is an internationally famed artist, but, still she lives simple life of a careful mother of a growing son at remote Puputra village in Chhatishgarh.

Pictures:

 

 

Sister Nivedita's Birthday remembered

Sister Nivedita, 100 years of farewell from Darjeeling

"The boat is sinking but I shall see the sun", she was just 44 years old, but had to bid good bye to Darjeeling and the world from this house, which is still to see the light of the restoration. Margaret Elizabeth Noble was born on 28th October, 1867 in Ireland, and it was her meeting with Swami Vivekananda in November 1895 which made her travel to India, and through her service to this country, she became Sister Nivedita. 

As a neighbour to Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose at Darjeeling, and on his request, she translated Rabindranath Tagore's 'Kabuliwalla' in English, which was very well accepted and made her a part of the then literally world. She was given the title of 'Lokmata', 'mother of the people' by Gurudev Tagore. She was often visited by Indian freedom fighters like Aurobindo Ghosh, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and others.

She initially believed that British in India was that of friendship, justice and development, but while working with the people, she saw the brutality of the British rule. She started a school for deprived girls in Kolkata in 1898, the school included adult women and widows as students, she was one of the frontline working leaders when plague broke out in India, and she has volunteered in the most difficult situation, thus giving her the name 'Nivedita', meaning 'the dedicated soul'.  

Help Tourism in 2011, during their Year of 'Enlightenment through voluntourism', dedicates their work to Sister Nivedita and requests all foreign volunteers to India to visit her place in Darjeeling as a ‘volunteer’s pilgrimage’.

Her epitaph aptly reads ‘Here reposes Sister Nivedita who gave her all to India’. 

Homestay Policy

Proposed by Association for Conservation and Tourism (ACT), an NGO engaged in community empowerment using tourism as a tool and conservation as a religion...

The Macmillan Dictionary describes homestay as

(noun) a visit in which you pay to stay in someone’s house rather than in a hotel, hence however and whatever we want to elaborate, the meaning is sharing the house with the host. We must also understand that the kitchen under such circumstances is common and the same food is usually being cooked for the host family is shared. In the past, visitors considered this where there were no hotels or lodges in remote areas or in cities where hotels were packed and there used to be a high demand for accommodation.

The Homestay concept has undergone a great change. Today visitors seeking for Homestay bookings look forward to authentic local experiences. Hence, the qualities of homestays are also diverse infrastructure wise, but all of them confirm strong local experience. Even where there are hotels, resorts and lodges, a homestay with 01 or 02 rooms are always in demand for a particular category of tourists who look forward to the feel of the place and the people.

‘Homestay Lodge’ is a little beyond the Homestays, where the host due to continuous pressure of tourists, looks forward to the privacy for the family and hence because of need creates an infrastructure adjoining to the residence, managed and run by the family from home. The kitchen and dining here is dedicated for the visitors only but joined by the host. The number of rooms are usually between 03 to 06, but sometimes extends to 08. Though the size is that of a lodge, but being run by the adjoining home, the authentic local encounters are still retained.

The Homestays are easy to maintain, uses mostly local resources and are not affected to a big extend for bad seasons as the overheads are extremely low. This is also a pride for the host, as he can host his own family guests with a good standard. The Homestay also helps to upgrade the hygiene and living standard of the host family, giving better opportunities to the younger generation towards global exposure. The appreciation of the visitors for the local natural and cultural phenomenon gives a sense of pride to the host community.

The Homestay movement helps the remote host communities to come out of isolation, thereby helping to understand and respect cultural differences, helping a generation to think locally and link globally. The resource exchange between the visitor and the host is more rooted and helps in creating a global community seeing eye to eye with each other.

A proposed policy for Homestays in North Bengal:

The word Homestay is often misused in tourism circles, mainly in registration and promotion. Hence, there is an immediate need to create a definition for homestays and provide a legal framework to recognize them under the central or state Governments. The major need is at nature based destinations, among people living in and around nature reserves and need to be involved in the conservation process. The proposals are as follows:

1)      The aim of the homestays in and around the natural heritage centres would be (a) improve the overall quality of village people’s life, (b) preserve and reinforce the importance of local cultures, (c) empower villagers to make their own decisions about their way of life and (d) contribute to the conservation of natural resources and the environment.

2)      Each of the homestay clusters are to be supported by a rural tourism resource centre which will help in capacity building of the homestay entrepreneurs, ecoguides and other ecotourism service providers, the monitoring will also be coordinated from these centres and research in creating better experiences locally.

        The resource centre will also monitor to issues like hygiene and child labour or any other activity related to cause a negative impact on the local society.

3)      The homestays to have a maximum of 01 to 03 rooms with shared or attached toilets, dining and kitchen is common with the host and the family manages and serves the visitors or paying guests at home.

4)      The Homestay Lodge should be restricted to a structure adjoining or in continuity to the home. The management to be restricted to the family only. The number of rooms should be between 04 to 10 with exclusive dining and kitchen for the visitors or paying guests.

5)      There should be subsidy if available of any kind, to be confined for the initiation of Homestays only. The Homestay Lodge to only receive recognization from the Government, but will be eligible for subsidy at par with any private enterprise related to small hotel.

6)      The Homestay or Homestay Lodge cluster must have a solid waste management system to be introduced by the resource centre.

7)      Similarly, the cooking fuel must be restricted to alternative fuels like Gobar (Cow Dung) Gas plant or Bio-Gas plant or at the best to LPG or Kerosene.