Travelling Without Footprints
Photo: Karan Madhok
From the Himalaya to the coastlines, unchecked tourism is destroying India’s ecological balance. We can’t afford to return to our pre-pandemic state of a tourist-induced environmental catastrophe.
India has the multitudes to offer nearly everything to a visiting tourist: high mountain valleys and passes, sprawling deserts, forests teeming with wildlife, golden beaches, architecture that goes back millennia, and a cultural diversity unmatched anywhere else in the world. The country saw an impressive 17.91 million international and 2.32 billion domestic tourist arrivals in 2019. This was, of course, just prior to the pandemic, which has since decimated the tourism industry worldwide.
While tourism is a much-needed wealth enhancer, contributing 9.3% to India's GDP in 2019, it has come at an increasingly untenable environmental cost. This is clearly something that was turning into a crisis of epic proportions before the pandemic-induced lockdown slowed things down.
Unbridled tourism had turned out to be a bane for India’s fragile environmental balance. Nowhere is the catastrophic impact of rampant unchecked tourism more pronounced than in the ecologically-sensitive Himalayan region. Unthinking development of ill-conceived and ill-planned infrastructure has caused environmental degradation and resource depletion at an alarming rate.
The union territory of Ladakh in the extreme north of the country is a classic example. Located in a cold high-altitude desert with an otherworldly landscape, its residents have for long adapted to consuming less than 25 litres of water daily. That was not the case with a quarter of a million tourists who would come to visit the place every year staying at its more than 700 hotels. Almost equalling the number of permanent residents of Ladakh, they would guzzle nearly 75 litres of water a day.
This over-consumption necessitates drilling into the Indus river basin to obtain the water required to sustain the tourists, which in turns depletes the water in the springs of the region which the local people source for their drinking and agricultural requirements. This is precisely the kind of tourism the region can't sustain.
Our whole approach to tourism has to change. Instead of having a bucket list of destinations to visit and things to do, the tourist of today has to engage first with the world nearest to him or her in a meaningful and unobtrusive way.
Similarly, the unbridled growth of coastal tourism has wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem along India's 75616.6-kilometre coastline. The primary reason for this is the infrastructure projects that fuel the growth of tourism that often involve the destruction of vegetation along the shoreline. This compounds the deleterious impact of global warming which threatens much of these regions with rising water levels.
Infrastructure projects such as jetties, ports, big road projects, dredged navigational channels, and the destruction of vegetation on the shoreline have all played a role in making the livelihood for the population living in the coastal areas and depending on coastal resources highly vulnerable. The only way forward—while recognising that coastal tourism is vital for the livelihood of large numbers of people living in these regions—is to adopt ecologically responsible tourism that has minimal impact on the environment.
The pandemic proved to be a surprising breather for many of India’s ecologically-ravaged tourist destinations. The major Indian Himalaya destinations in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Ladakh as well as the coastal state of Goa would see nightmarish traffic jams, overcrowding of tourist hot spots and mountains of carelessly strewn trash and waste left behind by the tourists in the pre-pandemic era. But the lure of cash and the insatiable appetite for the newly-affluent Indian middle class eager to travel to ever new destinations created a viciously anti-environment ecosystem. The advent of the pandemic brought all of that to a grinding halt. While those in the hospitality industry worried about what the future would bring and the would-be tourists champed at the bit to have a go at their favourite destinations, the ecology of the places in question started to heal and recover.
People living in towns like Sarahanpur (Uttar Pradesh) and Jalandhar (Punjab), hundreds of kilometres away from the lofty perennially snow-clad Himalayan peaks, could actually catch a glimpse of them after decades of being hidden by a layer of haze and smog. People in the metropolis of Mumbai could once again see hundreds of pink flamingoes on the beach. River dolphins were seen in the Ganga river hundreds of kilometres upstream—something unheard of over the past decades.
The residents of the tourist hot spots across the country, ranging from hill stations in the Himalayan region and the beach destinations of Goa to the forts and palaces strewn across the desert state of Rajasthan and the various pilgrimage centres of the country finally had their places to themselves. For some time, they could go about living their lives at a gentler place and not have tourists from everywhere impose themselves upon their living space. The groaning infrastructure of these places and the very water resources and the air were relieved of years of unrelenting pressure. An era of recovery began.
We can’t afford to return to the old ways again. No one will argue against the tourism industry as a catalyst of economic growth for a region or country, but it can no longer be run in the short-sighted, avaricious manner that was clearly headed for an unmitigated environmental catastrophe. The environmental costs will need to be taken into account as much as the economic costs while planning the inevitable revival of the tourism sector in India. The major tourist hot spots will have to endeavour to move towards a zero-carbon footprint. A lot will be expected if the various stakeholders like hoteliers, tour operators, travel agents, and others in terms of both responsible and meaningful conduct while making all attempts to promote and grow the sector.
There is growing appreciation of the fact that tourism needs to be responsible and tenable in the post-pandemic era. This is a collective responsibility. There is no other way forward than a sustainable eco-friendly way. As much as the industry stakeholders, consumers need to enhance the scrutiny concerning how things function within the industry, particularly with regard to the way water and energy are used and waste is disposed of. The demand for the greening of tourism has to be an all-pervasive one coming from all sides.
Our whole approach to tourism has to change. Instead of having a bucket list of destinations to visit and things to do—and in the process, expanding one’s carbon footprint—the tourist of today has to engage first with the world nearest to him or her in a meaningful and unobtrusive way. A trip to the mountains should not be about burning rubber on fragile Himalayan roads in an expensive SUV, but to reach there as unobtrusively as possible; and once at your destination, do more walking than driving.
Maybe it would be better to visit a quiet fishing village in Goa and interact with the locals rather than party all night at a ‘happening’ beach. Preferring to stay in local people’s homes instead of resource splurging hotels should become the norm. Instead of littering the country’s beautiful, but vulnerable destinations with all manner of waste-used mineral water bottles, potato chip wrappers, beer cans, food cartons and what not, one should try and consume everything in a reasonable and responsible way.
There also has to be a cap on the development of India's premier tourist destinations as these are already bursting at the seams. Instead, one should improve the existing infrastructure by making it more ecologically-friendly as well as safer for tourists. If you continue to build resorts close to rivers, on top of landslide-prone mountain tops and right beside protected wildlife sanctuaries, you are setting yourself up for many future environmental disasters as well as more epidemics and pandemics.
By shrinking the space for wildlife, we have not only upset the natural balance of things, but also caused increased man-animal conflict-something which purportedly led to the emergence of the COVID-19 virus. We are seeing increasing instances of monkeys invading residential colonies, wild leopards turning up in the unlikeliest of places, the absence of sparrows in our daily lives and so on. The root causes of these issues can’t be allowed to remain unchecked, and the balance of nature needs to be restored.
Animals and wildlife need their space and peace, and no development should be at their cost. Tourism should be carried out in a manner that helps improve the ecological stability and not annihilate it. As the dastardly pandemic winds down in India and things start assuming a semblance of normalcy and people head out to popular holiday destinations, let them remember that things can’t be like before. Not if they care for our future well-being, and that of our future generations
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Vipin Labroo is a content creator, author and PR consultant. A member of the Nonfiction Authors Association, he has years of corporate experience working with an eclectic range of clients, writing press releases, articles, blogs, white papers, research reports, website content, eBooks and so on across segments like technology, business & marketing, internet marketing, healthcare, fashion, real estate, travel and so on. You can find him on Twitter: @labroovipin and Instagram: @vipin_labroo.
