LEAP OF FAITH

“In 2019, we did an oral health assessment and found that a majority of the local population [in Spiti] develops severe dental issues by 40. This year, we’ve brought in two dentists to conduct medical camps from village to village.”

Dehradun-born Ishita Khanna is the co-founder and director of Spiti Ecosphere, a social enterprise that is shaping the ecotourism landscape of the valley.

She tells us about her serendipitous arrival in Spiti, what has brought her back every year since 2002, and how climate change is affecting the far-flung region.

Many a little makes a mickle. Ishita Khanna has proven the old adage right with her groundbreaking work in the field of sustainable development in Spiti Valley over the last two decades. A social-work graduate from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), she first arrived in the valley for a short stint with the Himachal Pradesh government in early 2000. By 2002, the mountain girl had made an ineffable connection with the locals— and a wonder plant called sea buckthorn—that led her to set up an NGO (Muse) along with two of her like-minded friends.

Spiti’s geographical isolation posed plenty of logistical problems for Khanna and her friends early on. There was zero connectivity in those days; mobile phone networks and internet are recent and still hardly stable. “Once, one of the processing units for sea buckthorn turned out to be faulty. It [sea buckthorn] has a twoweek season. So, we had to take the unit to Delhi overnight, get it fixed, and bring it back in time, otherwise a year’s produce would’ve gone waste,” she recalls. In the second year, Khanna suffered a major tragedy: two of Muse’s co-founders met with an accident, and one of them passed away. Khanna persevered and took a leap of faith.

By 2007, Muse had metamorphosed into Spiti Ecosphere (spitiecosphere.com), a social enterprise focussing on livelihood interventions (water access, reduction of fuel-wood consumption, etc.) and ecotourism (familyrun homestays; treks and tours led by local guides) in Spiti Valley. “The idea was to build a sustainable model that would generate enough revenue to support our projects,” she explains.

In 2009, the organisation introduced a volunteering model. Travellers could now give back to the region by volunteering to help Ecosphere in one of its projects. “It was when a bunch of our guests joined us in building our first greenhouses that the idea came about,” Khanna shares. Since then, people from around the world have come to Spiti and contributed artworks, handicrafts, and recipes; taught young children; helped in growing crops and building solar passive rooms, among other things.

Khanna spends half a year—from

May to October—every year in Spiti, spearheading each project and looking after Ecosphere’s two cafes in Kaza. The rest of the year, when Spiti lies frozen in sub-zero temperatures, she works remotely, preparing for the next summer of interventions.