India on Friday won three prestigious awards at the international travel mart in Macau for its rural and eco-tourism projects, an official said here. At a glittering function organised by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) Travel Mart, the tourism ministry bagged the PATA Grand Award and two PATA Gold Awards, the official said.

PATA, founded in 1951, is a non-profit membership association and works for building responsible development of the Asia Pacific travel and tourism industry.

While the PATA Grand Award was given under the heritage category for the Rural Tourism Project at Hodka village in Gujarat's Kutch district, the two other awards were given to the ministry for marketing its products in an innovative manner.

About the Gujarat project, the organisers said: "The scale of this project is very welcome and could have major positive impacts on the community." 

The rural tourism project is owned and operated by the Village Tourism Committee of the people of Hodka village. A rural resort, which boasts of totally modernised facilities, it is surrounded by the natural beauty of Kutch.

Art, craft and textiles made by the villagers is sold to customers, thus providing a livelihood to the villagers.

While the first marketing award was for promoting various destinations in India, the other was for creating a buzz about eco-tourism products.

Every year, the PATA Travel Mart gathers tourism stakeholders from around the world to network and seek business opportunities.

PATA's membership boasts more than 100 government, state and city tourism bodies, over 50 airlines and cruise lines, and hundreds of travel industry companies.

Around 1,000 delegates from across the world congregated for the three-day event. The Indian delegation was led by Tourism Secretary R.H. Khwaja.

The PATA Travel Mart 2011 will be held in Delhi in September, the official added.

Source: HindustanTimes

WASHINGTON: India has been identified as the most important country for tigers with 18 source sites dedicated solely to their conservation, according to a recent study.

In a worrying discovery, the Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups have found that most of the world's last remaining tigers - long decimated by overhunting, logging, and wildlife trade - are now clustered in just six per cent of their available habitat.

In their study, the researchers have identified 42 'source sites' scattered across Asia that are now the last hope and greatest priority for the conservation and recovery of the world's largest cat.

The securing of the tiger's remaining source sites is the most effective and efficient way of not only preventing extinction but seeding a recovery of the wild tiger, say the study's authors.

The researchers also assert that effective conservation efforts focused on these sites are both possible and economically feasible, requiring an additional 35 million dollar a year for increased monitoring and enforcement to enable tiger numbers to double in these last strongholds.

"While the scale of the challenge is enormous, the complexity of effective implementation is. In the past, overly ambitious and complicated conservation efforts have failed to do the basics: prevent the hunting of tigers and their prey. With 70 per cent of the world's wild tigers in just six per cent of their current range, efforts need to focus on securing these sites as the number one priority for the species not," said Joe Walston, Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Asia Program and lead author of the study.

According to the paper, fewer than 3,500 tigers remain in the wild, of which only about 1,000 are breeding females.

Walston and his co-authors identified 42 tiger source sites, which were defined as sites that contain breeding populations of tigers and have the potential to seed the recovery of tigers across wider landscapes.

India was identified as the most important country for the species with 18 source sites.

Sumatra contains eight source sites, and the Russian Far East contains six.

The authors calculate the total required annual cost of effectively managing source sites to be 82 million dollars, which includes the cost of law enforcement, wildlife monitoring, community involvement, and other factors.

The authors say that in spite of decades of effort by conservationists, tigers continue to be threatened by overhunting of both tigers and their prey, and by loss and fragmentation of habitat.

Much of the decline is being driven by the demand for tiger body parts used in traditional medicines.

The study has been published online in PLoS Biology.

More information on Project Tiger

News source: EconomicTimes