25 youths explore 'pahari' heritage

Our Correspondent

Palampur, March 17

‘Pahar aur Hum’, a residential workshop that brings together young people from the Himalayas, concluded at Sambhavna Institute, Kandwari village, near Palampur .

The 10-day programme, organised annually at the institute, is specially designed for students and social workers based in the Himalayan region to explore their pahari heritage. At least 25 youths from Uttarakhand, Himachal and Kashmir attended the workshops.

Prof Aniket Alam, a historian who teaches at IIT-Hyderabad, emphasised the diversity of the mountain landscape which provided basis for the survival of communities.

Prakash Bhandari of Himdhara Collective, who spoke to the participants on ‘Ecological limits to growth’, unravelled the importance of the trilogy of forest-farm-livestock rearing as the basis of life in the mountains and how this had been disturbed by the current model of development as well as global climate crisis.

Kulbhushan Upmanyu and Ratan Chand, both veteran environmental activists from the state, said one of the objectives of the programme was to inspire young people to deal with social and environmental issues. Apart from this, the institute hoped to build a network of the youth in the Himalayan region.