The Himalayas, in Sanskrit: Deanagiri, form the highest mountain system on earth.

They are located between the Tibetan Plateau and the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra lowlands and separate the two subcontinents – Hindustan and Central Asia. The Himalayas are an important orographic, climate, landscape and ecological frontier, separating two geographical worlds from each other – lifted to the height of the endless cold mountain wastes of Tibet from hot humid, vibrant, landscapes of the Ganges lowlands and the plains of Assam.

Some of the world’s major rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo–Brahmaputra, rise in the vicinity of the Himalayas, and their combined drainage basin is home to some 600 million people with 53 million people living in the Himalayan regions.

With its towering peaks, majestic landscapes, and rich biodiversity and cultural heritage, the Indian Himalayan Range has attracted visitors and pilgrims from the subcontinent and across the world. The Indian Himalayan Region has attracted those who seek vistas, adventure, cooler climates in summer, sport, spiritual solace, peace, and the many cultural assets of mountains – built to take advantage of the natural grandeur it manifests. These dynamics have turned tourism into a key driver of economic growth. For local mountain people, tourism means valuable economic and business opportunities and jobs, and for state governments and private entrepreneurs, it brings revenues and profits.

The British taught us how to ruin the mountains but in a sustainable form.

Take for example Shimla, the erstwhile capital of colonial India. This is quite an intriguing town for urban planners. The water supply to the town initially was ensured from nearby water catchment areas like Seog forests, which was piped using the pull of gravity, from the forest springs to the town. Later, a lift water scheme was installed as the population grew. This scheme from Gumma had an elevation of nearly 2,000 meters to pump water which was then distributed in the town.

The British could sustain such a system because of its imperial loot. But the high operation and maintenance costs of these systems have made it impossible for today’s urban local bodies to run such a system without heavy state subsidies.

The current model of tourism in the Indian Himalayan Range is viewed as a source of environmental damage and pollution, a threat to the socio-cultural heritage, a heavy user of scarce resources, and a potential cause of negative externalities in society.

These internal tourism development dynamics, including impacts of climate change, are important drivers of change affecting sustainable tourism development in the Indian Himalayan Region.

Tourism in a broader sense has existed for a long time in the Himalayas: in the form of pilgrimage to Hindu sanctuaries that are located high up in the mountains. With the arrival of the British in the 19th century, summer resorts, the so-called Hill Stations, were established. Examples of these foundations are Darjeeling, Nainital, Mussoorie, and Shimla. Nowadays, these Hill Stations are most frequented by members of the Indian middle-class.

“Modern” tourism in the Himalayan region – activities such as trekking, mountain climbing, sightseeing, and winter sports – has been introduced only in the last few decades.

These forms of western mass tourism have a huge impact on the environment and the local social structure. 

Tourism in the Himalayas, seen from a historical viewpoint, can be divided into three distinct phases or categories: religious pilgrimages, the British hill stations of the 19th century, and the modern mass tourism of the 20th century.

Pilgrimage to the Himalayas has played an important role for a long time in several different religions: the worshipping of holy rivers and nature deities has its roots in the Aryan culture and was later integrated into Hinduism. The whole Himalayan region has an important spiritual meaning for Hindus as a “sacred space” which leads to a different, Hindu point of view of the Himalayas: not a collection of natural features or a beautiful landscape, but a representation of the divine. 

It is estimated that pilgrimage to the sanctuaries in the Himalayas started between the 4th and 2nd century B.C. The earliest written evidence for pilgrimage to the Himalayas is the Epos Mahabharata from the 1st century B.C., which mentions Hardwar and the sources of the Ganga (Badrinath and Kedarnath) as pilgrimage destinations. The most important pilgrimage destinations were and still are the sources of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna and, even more important, Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash, the home of Shiva, in southern Tibet. And Vaishno Devi and Amarnath, two cave Hindu sanctuaries.

Until the middle of the 20th century, the number of pilgrims that went on the arduous trek to one of the sanctuaries was relatively low: for example, about five to ten thousand pilgrims arrived in Badrinath each year after a 30-day hike in the middle of the 19th century. But with the expansion of roads in the middle of the 20th century, Badrinath could be reached from Rishikesh within one day by bus. Since then, the number of pilgrims arriving in Badrinath and the whole Garhwal region has increased dramatically.

The British Hill stations, the second stage of tourism had its beginning in the 19th century when the British discovered the Himalayas as a recreation area. After several military excursions of the British in the early 19th century discovered the restorative effects of a stay in the Himalayan hills, several sanatoriums were established to provide services to members of the military. The first hill station was Shimla, founded in 1819. It was recognized as the government and military summer headquarters for India in 1838 (which it stayed until the British withdrawal from India in 1947), thereby gaining importance. Shimla has retained its importance until the present day, being the capital of the Himachal Pradesh

Other hill stations were Mussoorie (founded in 1827), Darjeeling (1835), and Nainital (1839). Up to 1869, several more hill stations were founded: Dalhousie, Dharamsala, and Ranikhet. After some time, in the late 1830s, the hill stations became more attractive for the civilian residents of India (especially for the colonial middle and upper class), because they were an opportunity to escape the hot pre-monsoon months and the summer monsoon, at the same offering a stay in a more pleasant region with a beautiful landscape.

The change started in 1947 when India became independent, and the number of British tourists decreased dramatically. After a few years of crisis, the number of tourists started to increase again: the Indian urban middle class had discovered the Hill Stations as an interesting vacation destination. Modern mass tourism started in the 1960s and the number of tourists visiting the hill stations increased by huge numbers.

Modern mass tourism in the Himalayan region started in the 1950s after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Mt. Everest and made the region popular in other parts of the world, which had until then more or less ignored the region. 

In the first years, the lack of transportation infrastructure limited tourism to the Hill Stations, and the Garhwal region kept the tourists away. But soon after the Indian-Chinese border war in 1962, a huge number of roads were built in the Indian part of the Himalayas. Although their purpose was primarily a military one, they opened the region to modern mass transportation. After these roads were also opened for foreign tourists, the regions close to the roads experienced enormous growth in tourism

The Himalayas offer the modern tourist a widespread range of possibilities: the activities range from visiting the unique cultural attractions, hiking, and skiing, to the more adventurous types of tourism. In the last years, modern (western) trend sports have been established in the Himalayan region: rafting, kayaking, canyoning, rock climbing, mountain biking, bungee jumping, paragliding, etc. Modern mass tourism has an enormous impact on the economy, ecology, and society in the Himalayas. 

The movement of Indian tourists is increasingly becoming individualistic as standards of living have gone up and people travel to Indian Himalayan Region landscapes as and when they want. As a result, traffic congestion and air and noise pollution, overbooked hotels, non-availability of parking places, and local water and energy security are becoming recurrent problems, even in smaller towns such as Dharamsala. Even trials of control mechanisms to restrict the number of visitors to very fragile sites (e.g. Rohtang Pass from Kullu Manali or Amarnath Yatra) have not yielded desired results as people find alternative routes and means to reach such sites

Tourism is a double-edged sword in most developing countries. While it can bring about a lot of revenue, jobs, and even foreign interest in the economy, it can also bring damage to the environment, damage to the century-old culture, and unsustainable economic growth.

With the tourism came the rampant use of reinforced cement and concrete in the construction of houses and a complete paranoia for using timber on the pretext of saving forests, even though it is a proven fact that houses in the mountains must be built with indigenous material including wood for reducing the carbon footprint. However, one finds exactly the reverse happening with the massive use of steel and concrete. This further increases the vulnerability of the load-bearing capacity of the mountains.

The people who reside on this mountain range have, over generations, learned how to deal with the harsh conditions. At that altitude, it is difficult to have access to a lot of the resources that the city dwellers take for granted, and these people, therefore, have had to make do with what they had. 

Infrastructure takes longer to be built; technology takes longer to be implemented in the Himalayan Region.

In general, the aim of tourism development cannot be only to create jobs and increase economic output but also to do it sustainably and not to destroy the natural resource base on which tourism depends to a large extent. 

The main problems with the influx of tourism or outsiders are water supply and wastewater disposal, solid waste disposal, and congestion in sites of special value and interest.

Managing garbage in mountain towns is a big challenge. Since temperatures for nearly six months remain low, hardly any composting takes place. Besides, waste collection, segregation, and treatment are very poor in these towns. Waste dumping sites have become an eyesore in these mountains. Most hill towns are grappling with waste treatment. With the opening of the Rohtang Tunnel, the access to Lahaul and Spiti is for a longer period of a year. The resultant huge influx of tourists means more waste generation. This has to be taken care of, or else the clear rivers flowing in the higher reaches will soon witness irreversible changes.

Then a new threat came to the Himalayan Region with COVID-19. It is not just a health crisis but it has highlighted the underlying economic and social inequities that are part of the fabric of our living.

It has precipitated a series of other shocks, one of which is a crisis in human movement. The current COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated that migration is an important response to stress, shock, and uncertainty.

Several districts in the Himalayan Region, especially Uttarakhand received a disproportionate influx of in-migration from Delhi and other states. This has led to a skewed population profile, with non-residents seeking properties to buy, lease, and rent. The impact of this has not been studied but pragmatic, humanitarian, and community-oriented responses are urgently needed.

The Himalayas had always attracted the social ‘outsider’, fringe people — those seeking a natural, reclusive or ascetic life. Mostly, these individuals did not disturb the prevailing equations in their chosen homes, primarily because their lifestyle was simple, rustic, lacking ostentation and overt luxury. They were neither trying to transform the social fabric nor were they insensitive to the extremely fragile ecosystem of these young mountains.

The new migrants to Uttarakhand have, for the most part, not chosen to live in the Himalayas because they are mesmerized and humbled by nature. They come to escape the pollution and confinement of the cities and have little idea or inclination to understand the history and culture of the region or the unique particularities of Himalayan living.

These privileged class migrants seek all the comforts and conveniences, the luxuries of their earlier metropolises while relocating to a pristine environment in a fragile, vulnerable ecosystem. They are accustomed to buying what they need, not sharing scanty resources, and they tend to have an inherent insensitivity to how the other side lives.

In earlier times, the local belief was that the daytime is ours and the nighttime is for the animals. We share the same space. High walls, barbed wires, impenetrable boundaries, outside lighting at night — everything that prevents animal movement — were a no-no.

The new resident is mostly unaware that Himalayan living compromises these very precepts. 

Travelers’ biggest mistake is that they want to experience traditional cultures without having to give up their foreign comfort. And the truth is we are often disappointed if a community or region chooses to adopt modern housing and transportation. 

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