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Are you a 'voluntourist'?

Thanks to the Modi govt's grand plan of a four lane highway all the way to the sacred char dhams, the entire stretch from Haridwar to Rudraprayag was a driving hell filled with loaders, tractors

Keya Sarkar
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Illustration by Binay Sinha

In order to avoid the extreme heat of Santiniketan from mid-May to mid-June, this year too, we took off for cooler climes. Although we wanted to go to Uttarakhand or Himachal we did not want to be anywhere near the tourist spots. So, after many hours on the internet, we chose a small village in Chamoli district in Uttarakhand for our respite. We decided we would divide our time between there and another little hamlet 30 kms from Dehradun. We rented two houses in the two places and our summer was sorted early in the year, by March in fact.
We decided to get off the train at Haridwar and take the road to our destination in Chamoli, a run of almost 250 kms. Thanks to the Modi government’s grand plan of a four lane highway all the way to the sacred char dhams, the entire stretch from Haridwar to Rudraprayag was a driving hell filled with loaders, tractors, bulldozers and just piles of rubble. Added to this, of course, was the traffic caused by pilgrims
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First Published: Jun 28 2019 | 8:32 PM IST

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