The ‘Mazha Yatra,’ held under the aegis of the Kerala Paristhithi Samrakshana Samithi, which is one step away from the Guinness World Record as the biggest student collective for environment, was held along the Thamarassery Ghat Road bordering Kozhikode and Wayanad on Saturday.
Organised by the Kozhikode district Administration and the State Council for Science, Technology, and Environment, more than 10,000 students from various schools in Kozhikode and Wayanad districts took part in the trek.
The Mazha Yatra was inaugurated by Minister for Backward Communities P.K. Jayalakshmi at Lakkidi at 10 a.m. The participants walked down the 15 km of Ghat Road with nine hairpin curves until they reached Adivaram around 3 p.m. where the trek culminated.
The students rallied behind the banners of their respective schools, carrying placards on the need to conserve environment.
The Mazha Yatra, held on the second Saturday of June every year, began 10 years ago with just 650 students. There were more than 8,000 participants in the trek in 2014. Various issues that haunt the Western Ghats are discussed in the Mazha Yatra every year. The plan is to get children involved with Nature and to make their voice heard. The Mazha Yatra, though launched in Kozhikode first, is now held in every district. The participants passed two motions on Saturday, one against the illegal construction activities in the Ghat section, which is hazardous to the eco-system. The students demanded that the Ghats be declared as construction-free zone and a protected zone on the grounds that it is ecologically fragile.
Another motion was passed against the two stops at the second and fourth hairpin curves of the Ghat Road. These stops were used to cool large trucks in the earlier days.
Though the cooling is not needed these days, the streams at the stops are being used by truck drivers to wash their vehicles. They also used the streams as toilet. This led to pollution of the streams, which were a source of water for shops and houses at Adivaram. This, in turn, led to various health hazards.
