The Death of Nainital: How can a state administration allow this to happen?

 I WAS IN NAINITAL last week to speak at the Nainital Literature Festival and what was alarming was the decline that Nainital has suffered, thanks to perhaps the inept administration that the city has experienced ever since its inception.

I went to school in Nainital to St Joseph’s, and at that point in time, between 1971 and 1979, it was one of the most pristine hill stations in India. There was rule of law and people were willing to respect the natural environment. The Nainital I went to in the early 2000s was when the High Court of Uttarakhand was being inaugurated, and I accompanied then Law Minister Arun Jaitley. This was under the Vajpayee government. And I went back to Nainital after 20 years and saw for myself the complete degradation of that city, but more importantly, not just of Nainital but of the entire state.

Many months ago, I had written about how some armed vandals had entered and occupied a senior citizen’s home in Dehradun. Once I had posted that on X, some people went into motion and the vandals were finally evicted. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that today Uttarakhand is perhaps one of the worst-run states in India. But the irony is it’s a BJP state. So, it’s not that these BJP chief ministers, whether Naib Singh Saini in Haryana or for that matter, Pushkar Singh Dhami in Uttarakhand, are in any way following either the dictum or the playbook of Narendra Modi. The result is that the average citizen is undergoing the kind of pain you and I can’t imagine. Try driving in Nainital or even walking. Both are impossible. When I asked a shopkeeper why there were so many shops, he turned around and told me that on a daily basis they had to pay `500 bribe to an official.

Now, is this the kind of India we really want to build? Where tourism, which would have been a great employment generator, is today in a pitiable state. Hotels in Nainital are charging the earth. Today, if you want to fly from Delhi to Pantnagar, the average airfare is `14,000. With that much, you could go from Delhi to Phuket or Delhi to Koh Samui, or wherever in the Far East. So, how are we allowing the total degradation and decline of such cities in India? It is no longer limited to urban India alone or metropolises. It is spreading like wildfire. And we, the people, are to blame as much as the administration.

You should see the kind of garbage dumps that exist in Nainital. These are dumps that are wilfully placed by irresponsible tourists. The lake has never been at a lower water level than it is today. I raised the point in my talk at the literature festival and a lot of the locals came up to me and said that they have been flagging this off, but no action has been taken.

So, the question I want to ask the chief minister is whether he is really happy presiding over an administration that is woefully and wilfully destroying the legacy of his predecessors. Is he happy being chief minister of a state that is now bursting at its seams where nothing in terms of infrastructure is working? Does he want to remain chief minister of a state that can’t deliver even on the basics?

These are questions I hope someone will answer.