Roads to riches, road to doom

While the influx of pilgrims and tourists may have changed some parts of Himachal Pradesh, other parts have resisted the destabilising influences of highways. But will this still hold true as the network of roads expands to further exploit the state´s natural wealth?

Gods, sages and renegades apart, the hills were traditionally a forbidding place for plains folk. It was the British who, escaping from the hot, dusty, diseased ´India´, began to dot the Himalayan landscape with hill stations. Sanaloriums, cantonments and exclusive retreats sprang up on the cooler slopes, amidst the fragrance of pine and cedar. The annual migration to the Himalaya of people who mattered, or were too ill to matter, assumed the nature of a ritual. To spend the summer in the hills was no ordinary privilege. Even the humble babu who followed the sahib with files revelled in the second-hand importance that it gave him. Shimla, the summer residence of the Viceroy, became particularly important as a centre of British social and political activity — not to mention the decisions of imperial significance that were taken inside its (in-roofed chalets.

So to Shimla was brought the cart road, all the way from Kalka, and upon it carts began to ply. The railroad followed. The British were, and could afford to be, snobbish. Civil and municipal laws were strictly enforced to keep the influence of the natives away from this little Scotland in India. With their departure the inevitable happened — up the cart road and the railroad rushed the dusty plains of India.

This has been repeated in several other hill resorts of Himachal such as Kasauli, Dalhousie and Mc Leodganj, where the Gora Sahibs resided in summer and to which broad roads were built at enormous public expense. It is to these old British townships that the Maruti-owning, middle-class families now rush during the summer closing of schools in the plains. Within a very short time, a large number of buildings have been converted into hotels. In Shimla, some of the old structures that have managed to escape the insatiable hunger of the bureaucracy for accomodation, or the ravages of fire, are now ill-maintained government hotels and guest-houses. Wild Rower Hall, at Mahsobra, (one-time residence of Lord Kitchener, then Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army) is one such building. From the ashes of Peter of (home to several viceroys), which was lost to a fire some years ago, has risen a monstrosity with pretensions to being a luxury resort.

Penthouses and Pilgrims
Post-independence India has witnessed innumerable rags-to-riches stories. Traditional social mores are increasingly under stress as the middle classes redefine the ´good life´. Not only is it respectable to accumulate enormous amounts of wealth, it is even more admirable to be seen to be spending it on expensive holidays.

The business community in the hills has been quick to mop up the extra money that has floated up from the plains. Luxury hotels offering videos and cable television; fast-food comers and drive-in restaurants have mushroomed along the highways and in the larger towns. You can now drive right up to the once-formidable Rohtang Pass (connecting Kulu to Lahaul-Spiti) and gulp down a chilled bottle of Pepsi which the vendor retrieves from a heap of snow beside his kiosk, stocked with packets of Uncle Chips. A rich Delhi businessman and his family, desiring a weekend with a difference, can fly to Dharamsala and find themselves lunching the same day at a hotel a wink away from the Dalai Lama´s residence in McLeodganj.

The obsession with acquiring a luxurious lifestyle in this world has in no way discouraged people from attempting to make similar arrangements for a comfortable stay in the next. Important temples are now accessible by road, and the number of pilgrim-tourists has increased markedly. Hotels and restaurants in traditional religious centres such as Jwalamukhi, Chintpurni and Kangra enjoy flourishing business, while numerous other temples are attracting an increasing number of religious-minded trave .Hers Kangra valley resounds with the music of disco-bhajans played on car-stereos as pilgrims flit from one temple to another. The number of taxis, too, is rapidly growing. From just 75 taxis registered in all of Himachal in 1986, the number jumped more than tenfold to 1,020 during 1989.

Between 1989 and 1990, there were 1,503 state transport buses which plied 1,272 routes within Himachal and outside. Chartered private buses and conducted tours of the popular circuits preferred by economy-class tourists are also offered by just about every travel agency. And the number of takers for such holiday packages continues to increase by leaps and bounds. If a recent estimate is to be believed, the increase in the number of tourists registered in hotels in the four main areas of Shimla, Kulu, Manali and Dharamsala has been nothing less than astonishing. While 150,000 visitors came to these areas in 1986, the number shot up to 940,000 in 1988 and further jumped to 1,100,000 in 1989.

The state´s large road network, providing 14,889 km of motorable roads in 1990, has made possible Shimla´s rapid transformation. Given the fact that the whole of Himachal Pradesh is hilly, the average road length of 40.3 km per square km is impressive compared to other hill slates (Jammu and Kashmir with 5.9; Sikkim with 22.0; and the national average of 56.1).

The pressures that such a tremendous expansion of tourism can put on an ecologically sensitive Himalayan region can well be imagined. Most of the popular resorts have grown in a completely unplanned and hazardous manner. The collapse in July 1992 of a four-storey guest¬house in Shimla, which resulted in the loss of dozens of lives, exemplifies the gravity of the problem of illegal and disorganised construction. The escalation of tourism has led to the mushrooming of scores of structurally unsafe buildings. The sewage and garbage disposal systems have virtually collapsed in most of these towns, while the supply of drinking water is grossly inadequate. With the network of roads spreading to the inner Himalayan regions of Kinnaur and Lahaul -Spiti, some o f these formerly isolated tribal areas, too, are slowly being affected.

Village Life Persists
There is, nevertheless, another side to this picture of enormous seasonal influx into Himachal The pressure is felt most acutely only along the main highways or major link roads. At the peak of the summer rush, the main street of Manali town resembles Delhi´s Karol Bagh market; but one need walk only two kilometres further north to reach the secluded franquility of the old Manali village and the neglected ruins of the mediaeval fort of Manaligarh. A short distance away from the crowded hotels and restaurants of Naf kanda (on the Hindustan-Tibet road), one c an still walk in splendid isolation amidst the thick alpine forests surrounding Hatu peak. Most tourist resorts in Himachal have been able to retain niches that lie beyond the reach of typical highway holiday-makers from the plains.

More generally, road-building and the accompanying growth of the transport sector has not led to increased urbanisation. Himachal remains the least urbanised state of India and most of its people still live in tiny villages scattered across the hills. The average population of a Himachali village stands at 238 persons (in contrast to Jammu and Kashmir with 726 and Sikkim with 682 persons per village). The continued existence of the small village, however, does not mean that the state has fallen behind in development. Not only are all villages electrified but, compared to the other hill areas of India, the per capita consumption of electricity in 1987-88 was much higher in Himachal. (In kWh: Himachal 145; Jammu and Kashimir 140; Assam 51; Sikkim 57; national average 191.)

Two other factors which have an important bearing on the future of Himachal are population growth and literacy. Here, once again, there is cause for optimism. Population growth between 1981 and 1991 was only 19.39 per cent against the national average of 23.50 per cent (Jammu and Kashmir stood at 28.92 per cent and Sikkim at 27.57 per cent). Literacy, on the other hand, stood at42.48 per cent in 1981 as compared to the national average of 36.23 (Jammu and Kashmir registered 26.67pcr cent and Sikkim 34.05-percent).

In effect, the construction of roads has not, so far, led to any drastic internal demographic restructuring in Himachal. Nor has it, for that matter, led to large-scale flooding of the state by immigrant settlers. It needs to be added, however, that the enactment of certain state laws has discouraged permanent immigration. Moreover, the fairly high level of socioeconomic development in some parts of the state has equipped people to withstand many of the destabilising external influences to which simpler and lesser developed hill societies are more vulnerable.

The impact of tourism-generated stress has, thus, been mostly confined to the more popular resorts located along highways. Much of Himachal remains undisturbed in this respect But the influx from the plains is not the only consequence of more roads and motorised transport Equally, if not more significant, is the fact that modern transportation provides an efficient means of carrying away from the hills resources that were difficult, or almost impossible, to extract. While there is an increasing awareness of the need to preserve valuable timber, the same cannot be said about mineral resources. As the state wrestles with its growing financial problems and endeavours to modernise its economy through industrialisation, there is imminent danger that roads will gradually become an important instrument in the exploitation of its natural wealth. The environmental and social fallout of such a development, as compared to disorganised tourism, would be of a far more serious and irreversible nature.

Singh teaches history at the Himachal Pradesh University, Summerhill, Shimla.