The tourism industry needs to set standards, increase awareness among the visitors, diversify and integrate communities to combat over-tourism

Hours long traffic jam in hill stations, hotels displaying “full” in red on their gates, internet flooded with pictures of people forming a beeline for water and residents left with no adequate resources due to over-tourism. All these incidents have become common, especially during the summer as the temperatures goes up and more and more visitors head towards the hill stations. Now the question here is:  where do we draw the line and where do we divert the travel addict without denting the tourism economy?

To ponder upon the issue and come up with various solutions across the industry, Mandip Singh Soin, Sumant Batra and Seema Bhatt spoke on Over-tourism and Sustainability at Exotica Tourism Summit organised by The Pioneer media group. It was moderated by Saimi Sattar.

A mountaineer, explorer and environmentalist, Mandip Singh Soin began the session talking about the potential of eco-tourism and the need to reflect upon responsible tourism. “We will soon ask the government to launch an itirenary for responsible tourism. There will be various checkpoints that the travellers will need to look at before embarking on a journey. It will also include checklist for the travel operators of the industry,” said he.

Another panelist, Sumant Batra, an insolvency lawyer and founder of Te Aroha, shared the instances which helped him set up his property in Uttarakhand. He said, “This place was not much discovered earlier. We started with five rooms and now have 22.” It has an unusual but appealing way to attract the visitors through storytelling. It has a museum and houses a library of 12,000 books. This new experiential helped draw tourists to a new Himalayan experience and ease the pressure off usual favourites.

Sitting next to him, Seema Bhatt who has worked extensively on issues related to eco-tourism, biodiversity and climate change emphasised upon carrying capacity, setting industry standards and striking a balance between sustainability and livelihood. “There is over-tourism because there are too many people visiting a certain location only. It is very important for us to see the figures of a particular location, set standards and put a limit on the number of people visiting,” said she.

She talked about the factors that determine the carrying capacity of a region. When its an ecologically fragile area like Ladakh, it depends on its eco-system. It requires detailed involved research such as the revenue generation of the area, population, number of tourists visiting, water consumption, waste disposal and many other factors.

But in order to keep the number of tourists intact, it is very important to route them to a different location. So we need to diversify tourism. “As we are operating in a country, which has the largest number of youth, we need to move beyond the old definition of tourism of just visiting places and focus more upon the experiences,” added she.

However, every solution comes with its own challenges. Mandip said that the people usually don’t take ecological challenges into account during the beginning. For instance, the number of jeeps in Ladakh increased from four to 450 after people watched the film 3 idiots. “When we suggest people on the carrying capacity they say ‘we have just started, we need people.’ And they only react to it when it gets worse. But you need to consider this problem during the beginning in order to disperse the people in a better way,” said he.

While building a property in a local area, it is very important to strike a balance between the local people, the area and tourists. Sumant said that he was very clear about not destroying the apple orchards to build the rooms. “I also decided that I would hire only the local people. But most of them hadn’t stepped out of their homes. So I called an expert from Mumbai who trained the locals for six months. They are very quick learners. Now they are all well-trained, some of them can also read wine labels,” he added.

The emphasis is to aid the local eco-system and ensure that the tourists do not impact the local people adversely. There are literature, art and film festivals to boost the local culture and attract more visitors.

For Seema, it is important to hire the local people, not just as labours but build their capacity too. “One must train and empower them. The local cuisine is a strong tool in their hands, one must use that wisely,” she added.