B Veerakumaran Thampi IT is more than 20 years since I had visited the Silent valley area. At first sight itself I was totally enchanted by its pristine natural beauty. Words are not sufficient even if I indulge continuously describing its majestic beautiful attractiveness and grandeur. Such unique landscape cannot be seen anywhere in India. On November 15, 25 years got completed since the declaration of Silent Valley as a national park. The link between Nature and man needs to be always there. Silent Valley is a symbol of historical fight of a handful of people having dedication and pure ideas which came to the rescue of it. This also illustrates environmental illiteracy of Kerala political leadership who except for a few had only negative vision. No one can push aside the role played by the media to make it a grand success.. If one question as to who rescued Silent valley is asked, then the answer will have to be limited to one name -- that of former Prime minister Indira Gandhi. She had earlier attended a conference convened by the United Nations in Stockholm on global environment and she had gained the required awareness of the topic. But she was not fortunate in seeing this place directly. It was her son Rajiv Gandhi, the then prime-minister, who handed over the park to the nation. The Kerala electricity board proposed an hydro-electric project in the area. On seeing an endless vigorous flow of `Kuhihpuzha' I realised that had the electricity board's project materialised, the entire forest land would have drowned making a demise-note on the same. With agreement from the Planning Commission, the Silent Valley project came into being. Plans for a hydroelectric project that threatened the park's high diversity of wildlife stimulated an environmentalist Social Movement in the 1970s called Save Silent Valley which resulted in cancellation of the project and creation of the park in 1980. The visitors' centre for the park is at Sairandhri. The park is one of the last undisturbed tracts of South Western Ghats montane rain forests and tropical moist evergreen forest in India. Contiguous with the proposed Karimpuzha National Park to the north and Mukurthi National Park to the northeast, it is the core of the Nilgiri International Biosphere Reserve. Benefits highlighted by the electricity board in case the dam came up was not only generation of power but also irrigation facilities to vast stretch of lands in the Malappuram and Palakkad districts. Successive state governments in Kerala competed with one another in breaking the forces against the construction of the dam. Assertion of the then chief minister P K Vasudevan Nair underlined state policy. According to him and other institutions, there was nothing to lose for Kerala in the Silent Valley if the power project was scrapped. Someone suggested a blunder that all trees can be replanted. The resistance of a handful of people having commitment to the cause finally helped.