Travelure
By Hugh & Colleen Gantzer
We, in India, have the greatest Dream Machine. Every year we churn out more illusions than any other nation on earth. They are produced in places called Bollywood, Tollywood and Sandalwood. But Dreams are not Reality. We have celebrated our very expensive G20 and Moon Landing. Now it is time to take another Reality Check. The true test of the success of our nation is the number of citizens who want to leave their homeland and settle in other places versus the number of people who want to enter and make this land their home. Another test is the dedication that its citizens have to doing their duty to their homeland. By both criteria, Switzerland and Singapore are very successful, and their citizens are prosperous.
In contrast, there are a number of poor people in our beautiful Himalayan state. Many of them, particularly the elderly, exist on a money order economy generated by their children and grand children who work in the urban centres of our state or even abroad. This, inspite of the fact that we have the potential to become as prosperous a tourism-centered economy as Switzerland. So, where have we gone wrong? Joshimath points a rotting finger at the maladies of our lopsided tourism growth. In fact, we are not the only state to have grossly misused our tourism potential. The whole length of our Himalayas is suffering from the burden of exploitation far beyond its carrying capacity. This has happened because low land solutions proposed by a plains-based High Command are dangerous in our highland Himalayan environment. The much-vaunted double-engine has no relevance in our fragile eco-system.
- If the proposed Dehradun Mussoorie cable car is installed, then places like Kuluket, Kairkuli, and Bhatta will be starved of development. Is this what the netas want to do to those who voted for them?
- The contractors and their political sponsors may welcome elevated highways but do our netas really want to deprive the villages that once thrived off the normal highway? Haryana grew on highway tourism. Tourism Malaysia developed highway resorts. The Motels in America also cater to highway tourism as their name suggests: Motor-hotels.
- Tunnels and cable cars prevent the tourism rupee from reaching the people who need it most. By doing, so it robs the tourism rupee of its greatest benefit: Its Multiplier Effect. Every time a Rupee changes hands it adds to its economic value. A roadside chai-walah spends his tourism rupee to buy milk from the local farmer who, in turn, spends that rupee to pay for the repair of his bullock-cart, the bullock-cart repairer spends part of that rupee to buy wood, and so on down the economic supply chain.
More specifically, we learn that a major contract has been signed with a French company to install a number of cable cars in Uttarakhand. Every cable car needs the supports of pylons imbedded firmly in the ground. Whenever each car moves between these pylons they are subjected to enormous pressure. This pressure increases when the wind blows. Moreover, Dehra-Mussoorie is in an earthquake-prone zone. Joshimath was built on unstable land and was a disaster of unplanned development. In most cases, cable cars may disgorge hordes of litter spreading water wasting, sanitation clogging, road blocking by day-trippers. Like Joshimath, this too will become a disaster waiting to happen.
WHY IS THERE A CRASHING SILENCE ABOUT THE CASH FLOW OF THIS PROJECT? Are we not entitled to know how our tax-payers money is being spent by our netas?
Finally, we would like to draw a parallel between the lyrical ode to the grand old Mussoorie Library written by Ganesh Saili and published in the Garhwal Post on 1st October. The Library was created by and belongs in perpetuity to its voting members. It does not belong to the Managing Committee elected by those Members. Similarly, Tourism in Uttarakhand belongs, in perpetuity, to the citizens of Uttarakhand and not to its netas, who are not elected in perpetuity. All citizens of Uttarakhand must benefit by its tourism; not just its netas elected for a short term.
In future writings, we shall explain how landowners in KOLUKHET, KIARKULI and BHATTA can profit by developing as independent tourist destinations on the highway to Mussoorie.
(Hugh & Colleen Gantzer hold the National Lifetime Achievement Award for Tourism
among other National and International awards. Their credits include over 52 half hour
documentaries on national TV under their joint names, 26 published books in 6 genres, and over 1,500 first-person articles, about every Indian state, UT and 34 other countries. Hugh was a Commander in the Indian Navy and the Judge Advocate, Southern Naval Command. Colleen is the only travel writer who was a member of the Travel Agents Association of India.) (The opinions and thoughts expressed here reflect only the authors’ views!).
