The Western Ghats has made it to the coveted list of World Heritage Sites. The World Heritage Committee, meeting at St. Petersburg in Russia, decided to inscribe 39 serial sites of the Western Ghats on the World Heritage List on Sunday night.
Criterion nine of the guidelines for heritage sites deals with properties that are outstanding examples representing significant ongoing ecological and biological processes in the evolution and development of terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems and communities of plants and animals. Whereas criterion 10 is relevant for properties which contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation.
The nomination processes thus successfully ended a six-year-long campaign by India for getting the sites inscribed on the list. India had submitted a dossier for nomination of 39 sites in the Western Ghats spread over Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris in 2010. Under the Operational Guidelines of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, India’s nomination dossier was peer-reviewed by IUCN experts and subsequently an IUCN Technical Evaluation Mission that visited India for field evaluation.
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