'Please 'Bear' with us' film bares steel plant threat to bears

Bellary district, the hotbed of illegal mining, has been triggering tectonic shifts in the political order of Karnataka. In all the heat generated by the mining industry, the threat posed by a steel plant that is coming up in the district to the very existence of the Daroji Bear Sanctuary, the only sanctuary of sloth bears in Asia, rarely makes headlines.

On Wednesday, a documentary, Please ‘Bear’ with us, at Nayana auditorium, Kannada Bhavana sought to turn the focus on  the Daroji bears.

The 16-minute documentary made by senior journalists Maya Jaideep and Kestur Vasuki deals with globalisation, mining and environment. It explains how the denizens of the sanctuary, the bears, the leopards and the birds, are all under threat because of the steel plant.

Maya Jaideep said the documentary provided an opportunity to the stake-holders to save the endangered sloth bears at Daroji sanctuary. It also threw light on other related issues like man-animal conflict and delinking of corridor. “We heard about this issue and discussed it with the people there. We got to know that Daroji is bang in the middle of the migratory route of the bears. Once the steel plant comes up, the bears will have nowhere to go and this will only lead to a lot of inbreeding,” she said.

The documentary was a result of six months of hard work.
“Documentaries like this should make people think and raise their voice against such issues. Not everyone  is concerned about the ecosystem. But those  who are doing something need all our support,” Karnataka Lokayukta justice

N Santosh Hegde, who was present at the screening, said.
Maya Jaideep and Kestur Vasuki have also made other documentaries including Heat in Dust and Death Knell to Nilgiri Biosphere.