Corbett Lodge
Delegates are shown the Canna root effluent treatment plant used at Aahana, that produces free recycled and fresh water after a few days using only plants c TOFTigers Library

Corbett Lodge Sustainability Workshop

TOFTigers in late April conducted a most successful Lodge Training Workshop on Sustainability called Driving the Change in collaboration with a TOFTigers PUG Outstanding rated lodge, the Aahana, The Corbett Wilderness.

The invitation was extended to all the lodge and resort community of Corbett and  attended by owners and managers of places like Namah, Jim’s Jungle Retreat, Vanghat, The Golden Tusk, The Gateway Resort Corbett- Taj, Rangers lodge, Sitabani Jungle & spa  to name a few.

Our focus was to expose the owners and managers to what ‘best practice actually looks like – with the working examples of the Aahana lodge, with its founder, Kamal Tripathi, a visionary having created a top grade sustainable property whilst maintaining a superior quality of the Indian hospitality, see here how they work.

Participants spent two hours being shown key areas, like energy production and use, water use and a novel form of black water management, all forms of plastic waste and waste disposal, to a point where it makes the lodge money, their habitat restoration and community fencing efforts, given that its lies next to the park boundaries, issues of the customer journey in sustainability, nature education, and noise and lighting abatement.  Aahana itself has been successful in creating a near zero waste property. Not only that, but Ayu Tripathi, along with neighbourhood children carry out a waste drive each month to collect waste from neighbourhood and segreatate and dispose it within their own waste disposal system.

Lastly – and to ensure the effect of unsustainable practices was made abundantly clear to the participating dignatories –  the group was put on a bus and taken for a visit to the river side of Savaldeh where the local Municipality had made an illegal and poorly managed trenching ground for all the lodges rubbish.

This visit was a huge wake up call to the Corbett community of an impending rubbish disaster next to a monsoonal riverside, and got a  first-hand account of the horrible conditions faced by the neighbouring communities illnesses and harm that this poorly placed dump was doing to their health  and to the environment, to which most delegates had been oblivious. The group decided to take a collective action for improve this – and fast.

With final presentations by TOFTigers founder, Julian Matthews and an excellent talk by Minakshi Pandey of Waste Warriors, the workshop was concluded with a group collective ready to redouble it efforts to change their unsustainable practices.