20 May 2023 | 04:13am IST
Postcard from Mussoorie
Vivek Menezes
H
ighly unexpectedly, I found Goa on the minds of many in
Mussoorie this weekend, during this spectacularly situated little Himalayan
mountainside city’s 200th anniversary celebration. Next week, the very first
regularly scheduled direct flight between Goa and Dehradun will link up two of
India’s most popular and significant destinations, and the locals here are
palpably exuberant about this new beginning.
Maharaj and the tourism stakeholders of
Uttarakhand are expecting the new flight connection to help attract the elusive
“high value tourists” (which actually translates directly to foreigners) to
their beautiful state, where the marketplace has become dominated by
unstoppably huge numbers of Hindu pilgrims visiting ‘Devbhoomi’, the
traditional “home of the Gods”. At the same event at The Savoy, the president
of the Hotels & Restaurant Association of Uttarakhand, Sandeep Sahni told
me “our challenge here is that we get millions of tourists, but 90 percent are
religious travellers on a strict budget. Of course, it is our duty to host
them, but we need to find better ways to do it.”
The backdrop to Sahni’s comments is the
terrifying “subsidence” – a literal collapse – which afflicted the holy town of
Joshimath earlier this year, where hundreds of houses cracked and crumbled,
while rendering entire neighborhoods vulnerable in this crucial transition
point between Rishikesh and Badrinath. At that time, the geologist SP Sati
summed up succinctly in Hindustan Times: “what we are witnessing today in
Joshimath is definitely a result of haphazard construction that has been going
on in the town. The mushrooming of urban settlements is not a parameter of
development but just physical growth.”
It is true that we get very few pilgrims
amongst the millions of domestic visitors who throng Goa every year, but I
still felt great déjà vu hearing Sahni describe the nature of the mass of
arrivals in Uttarakhand. The majority shows up in their own vehicles, which are
overloaded with supplies so that very little money is actually spent in the
state. They often carry gas cylinders – a ticking time bomb issue – to cook
wherever they want, and then simply throw their garbage down the sides of the
roads and into the rivers. This is identical to what we have been experiencing
in India’s smallest state since the turn of the new millennium, and one big
lesson may be that tourism in this country will always be like this. Instead of
anything sustainable, or even desirable, the industry in this part of the world
inevitably deteriorates to an ugly, brutish devastation that damages far more
than it produces.
This lesson has been painfully learned in Goa, of course, and it
is not necessary to dwell on the extraordinary costs this once-blessed slice of
the Konkan coastline has had to pay. What is truly tragic in 2023, however, is
having to watch other parts of the country subsume themselves to the same
destructive forces, as though no lessons can ever be learned. That is certainly
the case in Mussoorie, which is fundamentally utterly beguiling, with an
incredible cultural history of – contrary to Kipling’s maxim – East meeting
West and people from all over the world mingling together in a range of
pioneering institutions, including The Savoy. It’s wonderful that many precious
buildings do remain, but heart-sinking to see their condition, and the detritus
that has come up all around them.
It is not as though the basic solutions to these problems are
unknown, or even particularly mysterious. The first principle has to be strict
control on the numbers of arrivals, with an unwavering emphasis on maintaining
environmental, cultural and economic sustainability. Right alongside with this
focus on carrying capacity must be zero tolerance for all illegalities, in
conjunction with rigorous regulation of the tourism industry and all its
adjuncts. Unfortunately, whether in Goa or Uttarakhand, neither of these
essential measures seem to be politically viable. In my conversation with
Sandeep Sahni, it is notable that he brought up Bhutan as an ideal role model.
It is indeed true that may be one part of South Asia which gets tourism right,
but it’s no coincidence the Himalayan country is an absolute monarchy (albeit
with some recent constitutional measures).
I was fortunate to attend the 200th anniversary celebrations in
Mussoorie thanks to my friend Ganesh Saili, the terrific writer, photographer,
and chronicler of Garhwal. He lives on a spectacular promontory at Mullingar,
the very first settlement, and The Savoy is on another spur all the way across
the mountain. We drove there skirting an extraordinary setting, with the
magnificent Doon Valley spread out far below, perhaps best described by the
19th century Australian lawyer and muckraking journalist (he contributed to
Household Words, published by Charles Dickens in London): “The plains that lie
outstretched by the Simplon bear, in point of extent and beauty, to the Indian
scene, nothing like the proportion which the comparatively pigmy Mont Blanc
bears to the ¬Dewalgiri. From an elevation of about ¬seven thousand feet the
eye embraces a plain ¬containing millions of acres, intersected by broad
streams to the left, and inclosed by a low belt of hills.”
So
beautiful and unforgettable, but also shockingly untended. Worst of all, for almost
the entire ride, an overpowering smell of raw sewage flooded our vehicle. In
many ways, this strikes me as an entirely apt metaphor for tourism in
Uttarakhand, and Goa too. Here you have two manifestly amazing destinations of
global significance, which are both sinking fast due to incompetent and
criminal misgovernance, that is very swiftly trashing everything that makes
them special in the first place. The calamitous circumstances beg an inevitable
question: if the authorities do not bother about the places they are sworn to
represent and look after, why would any tourist care?
