HUGE rocks in the Indian Himalayas are being defaced by hundreds of hand-painted advertisements for multinational and local companies.
快猫短视频s and environmentalists are aghast at the new trend, which they say is destroying sites of immense geological and biological value.
The adverts have been painted on rocks that are rich in fossils of tiny plants and animals. The unique structure of the rocks also holds clues to what happened when India and Asia collided some 50 million years ago, geologist Ashok Sahni, at Punjab University in Chandigarh, told 快猫短视频.
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Currently, some 300 adverts dot a 56-kilometre stretch of the Manali-Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh, in northern India. Two cola firms, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, say ads for their products were placed by local bottling plants that went beyond their advertising brief. In a statement placed in The Indian Express newspaper, Coca-Cola has said it will remove the ads.
However, India鈥檚 Supreme Court has asked the two firms to explain why they painted adverts on the mountainside. The National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in Nagpur will now assess the damage caused by the ads, which advertise a wide range of businesses, including a Punjab-based publishing house and a local car repair shop.
Researchers fear the paints may have destroyed the existing rich diversity of microflora and fauna on the rocks, which are unique to the cold desert-like area and are largely undocumented. NEERI scientists say the harm done depends on the solvent used in the paints. Organochlorines, for example, can cause a lot of damage.
But removing the paints with thinners could do more harm than good. 鈥淚t is best to leave the ads alone and let them decompose naturally, which may take up to four years,鈥� says Palayanoor Shivasamy Ramakrishnan, an ecologist at Delhi鈥檚 Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Local officials maintain there is no law against the hand-painted adverts, which businesses increasingly see as a cost-effective marketing strategy. Ramakrishnan says it is now time the government declares the rocks a national heritage site to prevent further tampering.