Efforts to declare the Pulicat bird sanctuary a Ramsar site have been on for long. In fact, two former Union Ministers of Environment and Forests, Jayanti Natarajan and Jairam Ramesh, have often made promises in this regard.
But nothing happened then.
Again, efforts to get Chennai’s massive 695-hectare Pallikaranai marsh (in the picture above) and the wetlands in Karapakkam and Perumbakkam named as Ramsar sites have also not met with any success. “Applications were submitted a few years ago. But we are not sure of the current status of that plan,” said V. Srinivasan of Save Pallikaranai Marshland Forum. The declaration of the marshland as a Ramsar site will reduce groundwater pollution, preserve biological diversity, help check floods and mitigate the effect of cyclones and tidal waves.
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