A. A. Kulkarni
E-Mail: [email protected]
K. K. Das, S. P Aggarwal, Hitendra Padalia
Indian Institute of Remote Sensing.
4, Kalidas Rd., Dehradun, Uttaranchal, India
Abstract
India being a vast and diverse country has always something to offer to everyone. It’s glorious traditions and rich cultural are linked with the development of tourism. India has vast natural resources ranging from snow-capped mountains, blooming valleys, sea resorts, rolling rivers, dense forest, priceless mountains, temples and other places of heritages to vast desert areas, which can be important destinations for tourists (domestic and foreign). In older times it was essentially “Pilgrimage embodying simplicity”, morality, ecological purity and self imposed discipline, but it didn’t any adverse effect on environment. However, ‘New Tourism’ on the other hand, is a sort of luxury due facilities available and expected in the form of fine roads and comfortable transport system, good hotel/lodging places, easy money for travel etc. This ‘New Tourism’ has caused great damage to the environment and heritage. Realizing this fact there is need of protecting fragile environment for the future generation as well as makes it more lucrative for the present generation. For this the concept of sustainability arises to harness the potential available tourist resources. Sustainable tourism is model form of economic development that is designed to improve the quality of life of the host community, provide a high quality of experience for the visitors and maintain the quality of environment on which both the host community and the visitor depend. Ecotourism is responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the welfares of the local people. According to ecotourism society “Ecotourism is tourism and recreation that is both nature based and sustainable”.
In India the concept of eco-tourism is new and in spite of such bounties of nature and varieties of religion, culture and ethnicity, India accounts for only 0.4 % of the global tourism market and similar insignificant fraction of the world tourism revenue (West Bengal Tourism Report, 1996) 2. There is a need to develop tourist destination that can be managed scientifically to attract large number of international as well as domestic tourists.Present study is an attempt to identify ecotourism potential sites for Lake City development programme using Remote Sensing and GIS techniques in part of Western Ghats, Maharashtra. After identifying the potential sites, a demonstrative plan has been made for Ecotourism development based on locally available natural resources.
Study Area is in the Mose river catchment and Lake City project is created around the backwater of the Warasgaon dam. The entire catchment is being developed as a model Hill Station as Lake Town. The length and width of the area is 20 km and 5km respectively. The Total area of the catchmant is 134.70 Sq.Km. One end of the strip is bordering the coastal area of Konkan. The project location is about 50 km from Pune city one the Pune Sinhagad-Panshet road in Maharashtra. The geocordianate of the area falls within 18°21’00” N to 18°25’48” North Latitude and 73°25’12” E to 73°37’12” East Longitute.The topography, soil, vegetation, drainage pattern, climate have played important role in shaping of the region. The fifty percent of the study area is dominated by forest of various kind i.e. Tropical Wet Evergreen, Tropical Semi- evergreen and Tropical Moist deciduous. Study area consists of 23 villages; significantly, the population is nearly three thousand. The people are poor and marginal farmers, depending heavily on traditional farming techniques and shifting cultivation by burning and clearing the forest. The area is very closed by two metro cities viz. Mumbai, Commercial Capital on India and Pune, second city of Maharashtra State.Presnetly this land is purchased by The Lake city Development Corporation, Pune and they are developing this site as Model Hill Station known as “Lake Town”. The work on the project already started in phase manner. To be begin with 50,000 plants have been planted till pre-monsoon period as a part of ecological development. Three small dams are also under construction of tributaries to stop sediment deposit in Lake and water conservation for sustainable development of Lake Town. Satellite Remote Sensing data have been used to prepare Landuse/cover Map. NDVI Map has been generated for better discrimination of forest and other landuse classes. The forests are further subdivided into three distinct canopy density classes. The Shifting cultivation area which are an integral part of forests have been classified into current and abandoned shifting cultivation respectively. Because, these are the critical areas need to immediate attention for the ecological restoration. Land use/cover classes are very much useful for ecotourism potential assessment. There are in all nine and The weightages (Eagle, 1997)1 has been given in the GIS domain on the basis of the relative importance of Land Use/Cover classes from the point of view of ecotourism development. Soil map have been utilized prepared by Agricultural and Soil Survey Department Pune District. According to this map four types of soil found in this area, that has been sub grouped into three types of productivity level based on its texture, depth, and moisture holding capacity, erodivity level ete. The area of highly productive soil within forest has been considered for assessment and identification of potential ecotourism area by using the forest mask. The slope map has been used to identify ecotourism potential areas i.e. recreational zones, as higher slope are helps for the adventures sports like rock climbing, trekking and hiking, middle slopes are gives the site seeing, green parks, botanical gardens and other nature parks and flat to gentle slope for residential and service centers. The back of water is proposed to be developed water sports development and wetlands for bird watching purposes.
These maps are taken as the parameters to evaluate the area of high ecological importance.
The analysis has been done in Erdas Imagine 8.5 and ILWIS 3.1 softwares. Weighted approach was adopted to identify the areas having ecotourism potential. This has been done using raster layers assigning relative weightage in accordance to its influence/importance and expert opinion; the weighted layers are overlayed in ILWIS 3.1 to find out its potential of ecotourism. Simply by adding the weightages ecotourism potential map has been prepared were high weights corresponds to high potential. Finally a map showing three ecotourism potential classes viz. high, moderate and low was created for management planning purposes.
