CHENNAI: The Madras High Court on Monday ordered the state government to introduce an e-pass system to permit vehicles carrying tourists to The Nilgiris and Kodaikanal during summer. The move aims to regulate traffic in the hill stations which witness huge rush of tourists in April, May and June and to enable a comprehensive study on carrying capacity of these places.
A special division bench dealing with forest related cases consisting of Justices N Sathish Kumar and D Bharatha Chakravarthy passed the orders while hearing a batch of petitions regarding forest matters. The bench directed the district collectors of The Nilgiris and Dindigul to implement the e-pass system from May 7 to June 30 to regulate traffic and avoid disturbance to the movement of elephants.
The e-pass will be on the lines of the ones issued during the Covid lockdown and can be issued without any limits. District collectors shall ensure that visitors furnish details of their vehicle, number of persons and number of days of stay, the bench said. However, local residents must be exempted from the pass system, it added. The bench also ordered the government authorities to give wide publicity to the system across the country to spread awareness among tourists.
Meanwhile, the department of Forests, Environment and Climate Change, in a status report, informed the court that several measures such as registration of vehicles and scanning through cameras at check posts have been put in place.
The report filed through Advocate General PS Raman, assisted by Special Government Pleader T Seenivasan, said that during season, as many as 20,011 vehicles, including 11,509 cars, 1,341 vans, 637 buses and 6,524 two-wheelers, enter The Nilgiris every day while 2,002 vehicles a day enter during off season through seven entry points.
As regards Kodaikanal, as many as 5,315 vehicles, including 2,156 cars, 675 vans, 501 buses and 1,983 two-wheelers enter the hill station every day during season while the numbers during off-season is 2,100. Referring to accommodation facilities, the report said 1,035 facilities, including private and government, with a total number of 5,620 rooms having a carrying capacity of 20,000 people are available in The Nilgiris while Kodaikanal has 799 facilities with 3,325 rooms having capacity of 13,730 people.
It also said that comprehensive discussions were held with IIM-Bangalore and IIT-Madras, which were roped in for assessing and fixing the carrying capacity of these hill stations and measures to regulate vehicle movement. Both these institutions have expressed their readiness to conduct the study. IIM has sought six months to conduct the study while IIT-M sought a year’s time.