The descent of India

Popular holiday destinations are deteriorating fast

The annual summer and autumn vacation season provides a stark reminder of India’s growing prosperity as the standard holiday destinations burst at the seams with families who can afford the luxuries of leisure travel. The numbers underline the trend. At the start of the new century, some 220 million domestic tourists partook of the delights of India’s holiday hotspots, tourism ministry data say. By 2015, the number had burgeoned to 1.4 billion. The visible upside of this surge in domestic tourism has been the expansion of the job-intensive hospitality sector, with all its multiplier effects. Increasingly, however, it is the downside of growing domestic tourism that is becoming grimly in evidence. To wit: The rapid decline in the civic quality of India’s popular tourist destinations.

Whether on the mountain resorts or beaches, forests, lakes, monuments or stunning upland deserts like Ladakh, to holiday in India’s vacation hotspots is to confront ugly construction, piles of garbage, clogged draining, shrinking greenery and the general decay one associates with the worst of urban slums. Today, visiting any of the British-built “hill stations” amounts to an assault on the senses. The charming and sturdy construction of yesteryear and salubrious environment are increasingly giving way to unrelenting filth and jerry-built glass and concrete monstrosities, with little consideration for aesthetics or, indeed, safety. Nowhere is this confluence of poor taste and absent safety norms more evident than in Uttarakhand, where the 2013 flash floods saw dozens of poorly constructed hostelries collapse into the river, killing thousands of people. In Darjeeling, too, similar construction set new standards of ugliness and cling perilously to the hillsides; it is a matter of one earthquake in this seismic Himalayan hotspot for these buildings to collapse. Ladakh, which the introduction of cheap flights has made into a trendy destination, appears to be headed in this direction, too.

It would be easy to blame this degeneration on the rank indiscipline of the average Indian, with his proclivity to disfigure and generally vitiate his environment. Poor civic sense, however, is a state of mind that can easily be altered through the intervention of local authorities. Indeed, the power of enforcement to create behavioural change is readily at hand. Consider the vigilance in designated heritage sites, for example, or the contrast between pristine resorts like Kasauli or Landour that are maintained by the Army cantonment boards and their neighbouring towns of, respectively, Shimla and Mussoorie. In the latter two, as in almost any major resort anywhere in India, municipal intervention is conspicuous by its absence. This neglect is made worse by the fact that these civic authorities have clearly minted money by indiscriminately handing out building licences to hoteliers to construct eyesores with little or no integrity with the environment. To impose minimum building norms and standards is hardly a complicated exercise. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, local government has stipulated the construction of only adobe-style houses to enhance the state’s unique heritage. Jodhpur’s Blue City is an example of local government intervention in the interests of tourism. In Goa, zoning norms have been imposed, though admittedly imperfectly. Today, many tourism entrepreneurs provide alternatives to the growing unpleasantness of the conventional destinations but these are usually unaffordable for the average Indian middle class tourist. It is a matter of some regret that a country so richly endowed with historical and environment heritage should squander it so wilfully. States urgently need to mobilise their administrations to ensure that Incredible India does not degenerate into Incredibly Hideous India.