As a writer, people often tell me, ‘You should go to the hills and write.’ There is this romanticized notion of writers writing out of cozy cottages in pretty hill stations. It does sound lovely, except for one thing. There are no pretty hill stations in India anymore.
Instead, what you will have are traffic-jam filled hilly roads that lead to a town-centre lined with haphazardly parked cars. The sidewalks in the hill-town, if indeed there are any, will be filled with rubbish comprising of empty Kurkure, chips and biscuit packets. The shops, choc-a-bloc, with ugly tin roofs and grotesque neon signs will sell everything from chole bhature to children’s toys to fake pashmina shawls to digestive churan. There will be video game arcades and snooker rooms. There will be roadside stalls selling Maggi noodles in various forms and hawkers vending cheap China made Bluetooth earphones. Hotels will compete in making the ugliest signs and lighting possible. There will be open exposed lightbulbs and India’s favorite ugly light accessory – tubelights.
Unless you want to write about abject misery or on how to wreck a place that was once beautiful, Indian hill stations are no place to write or do anything creative.
Forget creativity, Indian hill stations are frankly no place to visit. Sure, there are enterprising Instagram influencers, who manage to make a beautiful frame with their phones, highlighting the snowcapped peak at a distance and hiding the Kurkure and Lay’s packets strewn on the floor. They put these pictures on Instagram, along with captions that sound nice but mean nothing, such as ‘wanderlust is my spirit animal’ or ‘my soul belongs to the hills.’ These same pictures pop up in your feed. You get excited, pack your family in and drive off to the hills, hoping to ‘nourish your soul’ for a few days. Instead, your soul gets a traffic jam after three hours and a garbage filled town after six.
Seriously, don’t go. You will do our mountains and mother nature a favor if you don’t go to India’s most famous hill towns. They are not a pleasant experience anyway.
More importantly, the damage to these towns has now reached serious, disturbing levels. It is no longer about just the destruction of aesthetics, for grotesque shops and dirty streets is one of the less pressing concerns. These towns are simply dying. They just can’t take the onslaught of the city-dwellers from the plains anymore. Joshimath, a temple town in Uttaranchal is literally caving in and people who live there must be evacuated. Unchecked construction, lack of concern for the environment and floods of people from the plains coming in non-stop has led to such degradation. Other towns may follow. For the sake of our beautiful hills, STOP!
We need to stop ruining our hill stations. They are India’s pride. They are needed for our ecological balance. They are considered holy. How can we let such destruction happen?
Sure, I get it. Tourism keeps the economies of these towns alive. Hotels, shops, travel agencies, cars – they all bring in money. But at what cost? Should we let people cut all our trees in all our forests then? Or let people hunt tigers? If those things are not allowed, how can we allow entire towns and ranges of mountains to be destroyed?
One also understands the need for Indians to travel and take vacations, especially in the hot summer months. Rising per-capita incomes (which is a good thing), has meant more people can travel to these hill stations. However, these hill towns are not meant to take in double, triple, ten times the number of tourists over the next few years. Many of these hill towns were made during British times, some over a hundred years ago. They are not at all designed to take millions of tourists zipping in their own cars. Sure, Indians must take breaks and travel and contribute to the economy. But not to the same five or ten towns. We must anticipate this rising need and make more nice hill stations. If the British could do it with far inferior technology a century ago, why can’t we do it now? We need at least twenty, if not fifty new hill towns with excellent infrastructure in the coming decades to share the tourist load. However, each of these towns must have limits – on construction, on empty land spaces, number of visitors and all other controls required to make the tourism ecologically sustainable. Right now, water and garbage disposal are a major problem in our hill towns. These need to be thought of beforehand, rather than create a town left to rot.
A country like Bhutan can do it. With far less resources, our little-friendly neighbour has done an excellent job at preserving the environment. Do Bhutanese people not need jobs or money? Then how are they keeping their greed in check and keeping the environment first? Maybe we have a lot of learn from our neighbour and can follow their template in keeping our hill towns safe. Bhutan charges foreigners a fee to be their country (not Indians). Maybe we can have hill towns charge a fee, which can be used to keep the town in good condition.
Bhutan also does not allow ugly hoardings. There needs to be standardization, in every hill town (think the uniform signage at Johri Bazaar in Jaipur). Similarly, if we ban plastic bags, we should ban anything sold in plastic packets too. Yes, Kurkure and Lay’s, am talking about you. They aren’t good for health anyway.
The Joshimath developments should serve as a wakeup call for all of us. Wrecking nature for a few rupees isn’t worth it. It’s dumb business anyway. If a town is destroyed, you can never earn from it again. Hill station tourism needs to be sustainable. And our hill towns, need to be beautiful. Maybe that’s when writers will go there to write, after all.