Himalayan Meltdown

ON A RECENT weekend in June, a long line of cars stood so close that not a hair could have passed between their bumpers at the entrance of Kasauli, once a quaint hill station in Himachal Pradesh’s So­lan district. They had arrived from several cities and towns, but mostly from Chandigarh and Delhi and its suburbs. Normally, a journey in the car from the nearest railhead, Kalka, takes about 40 minutes. But on this summer weekend, many tour­ists descended, not only upon Kasauli, but also upon other hill sta­tions like Shimla too. After a point, it felt as if there were more cars than people. The cars—with families and groups of youngsters looking for a good time for half-a-day or a night—were ultimately stuck for two hours, 5kms away from Kasauli, before they could make it to the main market. Many of them were already in party mode. Loud music blared from their cars. Many of them would later drink in their cars after parking them at some desolate spot in the town and then play the same music, only several decibels higher. As the cars kept piling on, some drivers became impatient and began to honk for no purpose, as if their horns would produce a gust of air that would blow away the cars in front of them.

The old residents of Kasauli—and it is true of all hill stations in the Himalayas now—have begun to dread such summer week­ends, as many city people in all their deranged belligerence and a sense of entitlement take over places that are not a weekend getaway for them but a home.

“[Henry David] Thoreau had Walden and I had Kasauli, or so I thought,” says Ashima Bath, the head teacher of the Enrich­ment Centre at the Lawrence School, Sanawar, on the outskirts of Kasauli town. She came here 33 years ago, she says, and was taken in by the calm, the undisturbedness of the place. “But now it has been taken over by loud honks and cuss words in more languages than I could imagine,” she says.

In the late 1980s, the legendary ad man Jai Kishen Dhaundiyal created a series of public-service ads for Indian Tourism for its “Keep India Beautiful” campaign. In one of them, there are two pictures side by side—one of cranes in the sky and the other of a group of men on a patch of grass who seem to be making a nuisance. Over the first panel, the message read: “The birds flew in from Siberia.” In the second, over the picture of men, it read: “The animals came by car.” In front of what is now playing out in hill stations such as Kasauli, that patch of grass in the tourism ad looks like an enchanted for­est. In the last few years, the uncontrolled tourist onslaught from the plains has ravaged the Himalayas. The worst affected are the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. In the last few years, especially after Covid, the number of visitors has increased so much that in places like Nainital ( in Uttarakhand), the police have had to deploy force to stop cars from entering the town. On summer weekends, an average of 50,000 cars is reported to be entering Nainital whereas it only has capacity for about 3,000 cars. On June 9, a man died after his ambulance got stuck in a massive jam on the outskirts of the town. A journey from further up that should have not taken more than two hours, took five. By the time he was brought to the hospital, he had died. A few days before this incident, another man, from Delhi, who suffered a heart attack in Mussoorie, above the Uttarakhand capital of Dehradun, also got stuck in a se­vere traffic congestion brought about by an influx of tourists. De­spite police escort, the family took an hour to cover a distance of four kilometres; the man’s nephew later said that they kept shouting for help, asking cars to give them way, but nobody paid any heed.

Even Union ministers have had to express concern about the havoc caused by unbridled tourism. Recounting his recent experience, Union Minister of Road Transport & Highways Nitin Gadkari highlighted the severity of the traffic problem in Dehradun. “Whenever I visit Uttarakhand or Dehradun, I usu­ally travel by plane or helicopter. However, this time, I visited by car, and it became clear to me that traffic congestion in the city is a very significant issue,” he said.

In 2023, almost six crore tourists visited Uttarakhand as com­pared to 3.68 crore in 2018, an increase of almost 62 per cent. By next year, the influx is expected to reach 6.7 crore. Himachal Pradesh registered about 1.80 crore tourists in 2024, an increase of 13.23 per cent from 2023. In 2021, this number was 56.32 lakh.

There was a time when people from the plains would plan vacations months earlier. This involved booking trains and cabs. It was pleasing to go to the hills and spend a few days in the lap of nature away from the humdrum of city life. But, today, one is more likely to be assaulted by honking and loud music streaming out of cars than bird calls. With the new money, the new tourist is in his flashy SUV; he is the one who has forced hotels to put air-conditioners in rooms because he thinks he has money and he deserves it. Earlier, it was not required at all and was an un­necessary thing, a means to assuage the ego of the new money. But now, with temperatures rising because of the impact on local ecology, the same ACs, ironically, may be a necessity, according to Vishal Singh, director of the Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR), a research institute that works on sustainable development in the Himalayas, popular hill stations have seen a significant rise in temperatures during summers and have be­come extremely hot.

“There was a time when you would take a local cab from the railway or bus station to your hotel and for the rest of the days, you’d just explore the surrounding areas mostly on foot. But now, many consider it insulting to even walk a mile without their SUVs,” said Santosh, a local shopkeeper in Nainital’s main mar­ket. This decaying dependency on the car is expressed succinctly by standup comedian Ravi Gupta. “The hills feel good as long as you are in the car. The moment you get down, you will have to walk,” he says in one of his acts. He goes further. He and his friend, Gupta says, went on a trek at the end of which they were told they’d come across a waterfall. When they reached there, there was no waterfall, but just two or three drain-like tiny streams.

There are two other big factors re­sponsible for the massive upsurge in tourism. Many tourists are now drawn to some places because of social me­dia influence. Travel influencers on Instagram often popularise some of the destinations. These influencers have a huge following and many of the Instagram reels promoting this or that place go viral, leading to a sharp in­crease in visitors. Also, in the last few years, religious tourism has increased significantly, again partially due to social media influence. In Nainital, for example, major jams have been caused on the Bhowali-Nainital road due to a manifold increase of visitors to the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram. The number of visitors suddenly interest­ed in the ashram is because of a visit a few years ago by cricketer Virat Kohli and his wife, actor Anushka Sharma. The Char Dham yatra also attracts pilgrims in droves, a number that is staggeringly increasing. Last year, about 47 lakh pilgrims visited these shrines. In both 2023 and 2024, over 5 lakh vehicles entered the pilgrimage area for this purpose. The glacial areas around these yatras experience temperature rise because of so much activ­ity that geologists warn will have serious consequences. The government had earlier introduced a cap on the number of pilgrims that could visit these shrines per day; but later it was removed. A report by the Indian Insti­tute of Management Rohtak, on the request of the Uttarakhand government, has strongly advocated, among other measures, putting a limit on the number of pilgrims. But despite inviting the report, the state government chose not to implement the suggestions. Even when there is no cap, the greed of some people is such that even on a pilgrimage, they look for shortcuts. On June 14, 2025, the Uttarakhand police seized two ambulances that were pre­tending to carry patients. It turned out that some devotees had hired them from Harid­war to avoid traffic and reach the Kedarnath shrine quickly.

The tourist boom has also led to construc­tion madness. In summers, especially on weekends or during holidays, hotel occupancy in many hill stations reaches 80-90 per cent. It has led locals and outsiders both to start hotels and inns, putting tremendous pres­sure on natural resources. A report submitted to the National Green Tribunal by an expert committee has revealed shocking details about how many hill areas have become a death trap awaiting di­sasters. It says, for example, that 90 per cent of Shimla’s core city area is constructed on slopes over 60 degrees. “All these construc­tions are against all the architectural and geological norms and this makes Shimla highly unstable and susceptible to natural disasters,” the report says. Problems also arise because builders copy designs that are ideally suited for plains, with complete disregard for what the local landscape demands. In closely-knit communities, where everyone knows each other, it is often easy to bypass laws and get necessary permissions for building.

With much increased human presence, the other searing problem remains that of waste. Social media is full of photo­graphs and videos from hill stations, even remotely located plac­es, where plastic and non-biodegradable waste have made the hills indistinguishable from cities. In Manali, Himachal Pradesh, for example, the town’s waste treatment plant faces the challenge of processing garbage, which is five times over its capacity. In 2019, a lawyer, Rakshit Joshi, filed a PIL against the Uttarakhand government for allowing a lavish wedding of a businessman’s family in Auli, a sub-alpine meadow, 14km from Joshimath town in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district. The court in its interim or­der allowed the wedding in consideration of societal norms, but said that the event caused pollution. In its submission, the state pollution board said that the event had generated 32.6 tonnes of waste, out of which almost half was non-biodegradable, mostly plastic. The tourist overflow has also led to severe water short­age. While businesses like hotels make do with water tankers, it is the local residents who are left to struggle. “The villagers do not get water owed to them as the hospitality business does not extend its red carpets to them. Pipelines run dry, making it liter­ally the case of ‘water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink’,” says Bath.

Tourism is important, and so is development around hilly areas. But does it have to be like this—a narrative not envisioned in welfare but mired in greed? After all, there are countries like Costa Rica, or for that matter, even neighbouring Bhutan, that have built their models of tourism around conservation and not put resources under so much strain. “Distrust and hatred of nature—especially of human nature or what little is known or (mis)understood about it—have been so intrinsic to the modern enterprise that the distance a society has travelled from nature has virtually come to constitute the very definition of progress,” writes the ecologist Aseem Shrivastava in his recent book The Grammar of Greed. With its most fragile ecosystems under threat and with the crisis of pollution making most Indian cities unliv­able, can India really afford such environmental degradation? The answer, as that plastic bottle floating in a river in Kullu will cry out loud, is blowing in the hills.

Char dham yatrahill stationsHimalayaIndian ecologyKedarnathNainitalnon-biodegradable wasteOvertourismreligious tourismShimla