Travel pass required to visit St Martin's Island, 12 directives must be followed

Tourists can only visit during the daytime in November and no overnight stays will be allowed

St Martin's Island will open to tourists on a limited scale for four months starting Nov 1 ahead of the tourist season after a nine-month closure.

However, visitors to the country's only coral island must adhere to a strict set of restrictions.

Tourist access to the island has been suspended since Feb 1 of this year. Now tourists will have the opportunity to visit the island for three months, from November to January.

The Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA), however, will not permit any vessel to operate to St Martin's without the approval of the environment ministry. Furthermore, tourists must obtain a travel pass to visit the island.

Additionally, in the month of November, tourists will only be able to travel during the daytime and will not be allowed to stay overnight. This means that even if a ship leaves St Martin's by 5pm, it will be midnight by the time it reaches Cox's Bazar. Thus, a tourist will be able to stay on St Martin's for a maximum of two hours.

Overnight stays on the island will only be permitted in December and January.

Tourist access to the island will be completely closed in February. An average of no more than 2,000 tourists will be allowed to visit the island daily.

The government issued 12 directives to preserve the environment, ecology, and biodiversity of this coral island.

The ministry’s Environment-2 Wing issued the related notification last Monday.

St Martin's is a small coral island in the Bay of Bengal, near the Myanmar border in the southeast of Bangladesh, covering an area of 8.3 sq km. It is 120km away from the district town of Cox's Bazar.

Since the interim government came to power, the environment ministry has imposed multiple restrictions on travel to St Martin's, leaving local residents in "extreme hardship”.

Seventy percent of the island's 10,000 residents have become dependent on tourism over the past two and a half decades. The only source of livelihood for the remaining approximately 1,600 fishing families is the "sea”. People in both professions are now in crisis.

Due to the government's strict restrictions on tourist travel, St Martin's did not receive the expected number of tourists last season, resulting in significant losses for the island's tourist operators and local small businesses.

Although island residents and tourism-related businesses peacefully protested the restrictions, the government's decision ultimately remained firm.

The island is a breeding ground for sea turtles. In the past, it was also home to 68 species of coral, 151 species of algae, 191 species of molluscs (or cowrie-type animals), 40 species of crabs, 234 species of marine fish, five species of dolphins, four species of amphibians, 28 species of reptiles, 120 species of birds, 20 species of mammals, 175 species of plants and two species of bats, among other animals.

Many of these species are now on the verge of extinction. Climate change is also gradually causing the loss of this biodiversity.

To protect biodiversity, the government declared a 590-hectare area of St Martin's an “ecologically critical zone” in 1999.