An indigenous community who live in the Nilgiris district.
Published in Chapter:
Tourism in Sigur Plateau in the Western Ghats of India: An Impact Assessment Report
Aditi Chanchani (Equitable Tourism Options (EQUATIONS), India), Swathi Seshadri (Equitable Tourism Options (EQUATIONS), India), and Rosemary Viswanath (Group Relations India, India)
Copyright: © 2019
|Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5843-9.ch009
Abstract
Tourism has emerged as a major player and an increasing threat to the Western Ghats, its ecological landscape, the diverse ecosystems associated with it, and the many groups of indigenous (Adivasi) and other traditional forest-dwelling communities living in it. Unregulated growth and overly ambitious developmental plans in environmentally fragile areas have many strong and often irreversible fallouts: increased deforestation, fragmentation of wildlife habitats, closing of critical links between habitats, loss of people's access to and control over resources being among some of them. In 2010, EQUATIONS initiated a study that aimed to understand the impacts of tourism on the Sigur Plateau in the Western Ghats in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, taking into consideration the impacts of tourism on the biodiversity, natural resources, and the communities that live in and around the area. The scope of the study was to assess tourism in the realms of economic, environmental, and social impacts. For the purposes of this chapter, the environmental impacts have been focused on.