Parashuramegowda:
A century-old silk factory campus gets a last-minute reprieve and the T Narsipura town, Mysuru district, Karnataka may still get its sports stadium elsewhere. Not only the KSIC Silk Filature Factory but also the biodiversity rich campus with more than 500 trees have been saved due to the state govt’s decision to drop their harebrained scheme of constructing a sports stadium in the heart of this heritage campus.
In what can only be described as a quiet triumph of civic action, a thickly wooded heritage campus in the middle of T Narsipura has been saved from the bulldozer and the story of how it happened offers a rare, heartening glimpse of a state government that seems to be actually listening.
The land in question is not an ordinary plot. Tucked away within the campus of the historic KSIC filature factory – it was built in 1912 to spin the silk thread that is weaved on to make the Mysore Silk Saree world-famous.
The KSIC campus at T Narsipura is a lush 13.5-acre lung space that has quietly been a home to over 900 trees, many of them planted when the factory itself was young.
It is the kind of place that cities and towns slowly strangle without ever quite noticing what they have lost.
What nearly strangled it this time was a sports stadium.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had promised the youth of T Narsipura a modern sports stadium – a promise worth keeping. Somewhere along the chain of government decision-making, however, a portion of this KSIC Silk Filature Factory campus emerged as the chosen site.
Letters flew between the sericulture department, KSIC and the Department of Sports and Youth Empowerment. KSIC raised valid objections. They were noted, and then largely set aside.
By the time anyone outside the bureaucracy knew what was happening, the land had already been transferred and survey teams had arrived to mark the heritage trees for felling.
That is when a group of worried factory employees reached out to Parisarakkaagi Naavu (People for Environment), an environmental advocacy organization based in Bengaluru.
The organisation moved quickly. A biodiversity assessment team was on the ground within 24 hours. What they found, in just a couple of hours of walking through the property, was remarkable.
A treasure trove of biodiversity – trees over a century old, more than 40 bird species, a healthy butterfly population, and a density of roosting, feeding and nesting birds that would be the envy of many a dedicated wildlife reserve.
In the middle of a densely built-up T Narsipura town, this verdant KSIC campus simply stood out and was quite simply an irreplaceable green commons.
The practical objections too were just as compelling. The parcel earmarked for the sports stadium was L-shaped, in fact, poor geometry for any serious sporting facility.
More pointedly, placing a public sports complex intended for children directly adjacent to a working factory and its chimneys raised very serious questions about air quality and long-term health effects.
The more one examined the proposal for setting up a sports stadium at the KSIC campus, the harder it became to understand how this proposal had progressed so far.
Parisarakkaagi Naavu took its findings to every stakeholder it could reach: local administrative officers, the Chief Minister’s office, well-wishers from across the region.
Further, members of the Mysore Royal family, including MP Yaduveer Wadiyar and Pramoda Devi Wadiyar too showed immense interest. In fact, the response, once people grasped the full picture, was very swift and unambiguous.
Within days, the government acknowledged that the site selection had not received the scrutiny it deserved. The plan for the KSIC campus has been shelved now. Efforts are now underway to identify a genuinely suitable location for what could be a world-class facility.
The trees still stand. The birds are still nesting. The factory, a living piece of Karnataka’s cultural and industrial heritage, can continue its work undisturbed.
And the youth of T. Narsipura? They deserve their stadium — and they may yet get one, in a place that makes sense, as their Chief Minister promised. That, too, would be a win worth celebrating.