Why build more hotels when Uttarakhand could become India's skills engine

Why building educational institutions is a better path to promoting Uttarakhand than relying on unplanned tourism that is degrading its environment

In Uttarakhand, the second season of the “winter Char Dham” has just begun. This is the state government’s way of ensuring all-round religious tourism, maximising revenue from the business. Last year, about 30,000 pilgrims visited the winter abodes of the deities, which are situated in the lower reaches of the Himalayas. Just like last year, this year too, winter Char Dham will be making its contribution to the piles of garbage, much of it plastic, adorning the mountainsides and to the general environmental degradation that accompanies the business of housing and transporting pilgrims to the sacred sites. None of this appears to bother the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state government. But the asymmetry between religion as a business and as a spiritual exercise has never been wider. 

 

The sites of the “winter Char Dham” are Kharsali (for Yamunotri), Mukhba (Gangotri), Ukhimath (Kedarnath) and Pandukeshwar (Badrinath). Like their summer counterparts that play host to five to six million pilgrims, all four winter sites face substantial and growing environmental threats owing to their fragile ecology and impacts of climate change. Tourism and “development” (read jerry-built hotels, rest houses and restaurants) have added their mite to the impending crisis that manifests itself periodically in flash floods and landslides. Pandukeshwar is about 24 km from Joshimath, the town that has been steadily sinking due to over-development but has been blessed by an official renaming to its ancient name, Jyotirmath, last year. 

 

It is states such as Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand that are witnessing the flipside of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s game-changing road-building programme. Today, highways and new roads can deliver thousands of pilgrims and holidaymakers to the valley and its scenic upper reaches with far greater ease than ever before. Residents of Landour, the charming former British sanatorium town situated above Mussoorie, increasingly find themselves hemmed in (or crowded out of) their homes over the weekends, as tourist hordes from the National Capital Region or nearby towns in the plains power in with their SUVs and performance bikes, pounding music and noisy extended families.   

 

The collateral damage has been the unsightly overbuilding over the landscape. Already in the capital city of Dehradun, enormous blockhouses in the form of five-star hotels from all the marque names have set up shop. They serve a burgeoning clientele of well-heeled and time-challenged devotees who want to avoid the madding crowds on the roads by availing of helicopter services with dubious safety records to deliver them to the deity of their choice. These hotels are the latest addition to the increasingly unsightly and ever-higher multi-storeyed buildings that are altering the picturesque mountain skyline. Likewise, one depressing legacy of the growing prosperity of the area can be seen in vast malls that rival those of Gurugram or Mumbai in size and anonymous uniformity. 

 

Tourism would not have had so deleterious an impact had the administration prepared for the greater tourist influx with due regulatory vigour. Standards for garbage disposal and architectural rules that are ecologically friendly and aesthetically in sync with local traditions could have transformed the state into a blueprint of sustainable development for other hilly states to follow. Instead, the same depressing pattern can be seen in every “hill station” around the country, where Dubai-style glass and granite structures intrude on the environment.

 

At least part of the reason for this destructive trajectory is rooted in ideological limitations of the current ruling party and the failure of imagination of successive administrations after the state broke away from Uttar Pradesh in 2000. With fewer resources beyond its Hindu pilgrimage sites and natural beauty, religious tourism offered an expedient means of bringing in the revenue. But there is another developing trend that the state authorities appear to ignore unless it involves a major real estate play. This is in the education space. Leaving aside upscale legacy institutions such as The Doon School, the state is rapidly developing as a haven of education, including vocational training, for middle class Indians. In the 2023 film Laapataa Ladies  an ambitious young bride applies to a Dehradun institution for a computer course. Indeed, a host of schools and universities (“deemed” or otherwise) of questionable quality have also mushroomed almost unnoticed in the past two decades. This offers an invaluable clue to the direction that state could take. 

 

Global capability centres and the expected boom in information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services as a result imply that the demand for IT talent will multiply several times over in the near future. Making the state, and its steadily deteriorating capital city, a centre for high-quality IT, ITeS and AI-driven training with all its collateral benefits, would be a better way of building lasting equity rather than enabling the steady environmental destruction of rare natural bounty through unplanned tourism.