Tread Softly on Auli Gorson

Downhill skiing is being introduced in the hills of Uttar, Pradesh, but at what cost to the local society and environment? We must study the experience in the Alps, and consider cross-country skiing.

Far above Joshimath, the peach, apricot and apple trees give way to the potato-fields and bugyals (meadows) of Auli. A forest of oak and conifers separates Auli from the meadows of Gorson, where flowers bloom for a short period between mid-June and end-September.

A 13-kilometre unmetalled road winds up the mountainside from Joshimath to Auli. Here, the Uttar Pradesh government undertaking known as the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigarn (GMVN) is trying to develop the largest winter sports and skiing resort in the Himalaya. Although at present the energies of the GMVN are concentrated on Auli, it is eyeing the vast, undulating pastures of Gorson as well. If there is profit in Auli, the investors expect to make a killing with Gorson.

The idea of a winter sports resort at Auli was first floated in 1976. The Lucknow government promised to provide the needed infrastructure in the hope that private investors would take over and create a "tourist paradise" which would shame Kashmir's Gulmarg. Money would flow in from the influx of Indian as well as foreign skiers. GMVN would be able to offer 'locals' opportunities for regular employment.

The skiing development programme was Lucknow's much-publicised response to emerging popular sentiment in the U.P. Himalaya during the early 1970s that they had been robbed more than they had benefitted from development in post-independence India. Auli was planned as an experiment at income generation which might also serve as an example for development elsewhere in the Himalaya.

Auli would have to be made easily accessible, so a ropeway system was designed to carry spacious cable cars from Joshimath at (6,000 ft) to Auli (10,500 ft). The construction work was undertaken by Triveni Structurals, with the help of Voest-Alpine, a large engineering firm from Linz, Austria. Sometime in the early 1980s, work on the project stopped after only three out of ten ropeway pillars had been put up. The equipment which had been imported from Austria in the first flush of enthusiasm could not make it up the narrow roads and bridges of the Alaknanda valley. The heavy cables and the ropeway gondolas have lain rusting all these years at the Bombay docks.

THE REAL COST

Fifteen years have passed since the first budget for Auli was proposed in 1976. It was revised upwards the last time in 1988 and there is already talk of shortage of funds. The contracts for preparing the foundations for the remaining pillars were re-negotiated in early 1990 and work began again last summer.

Mules laden with bags of sand and cement make their way up and down the Auli meadows, cutting deep gashes on the mountain flanks. Labourers blast away at rocks; on softer ground, smaller stones are dug out with spades and shovelled into cloth buckets slung on a wooden beam carried by two men.

Daily-wage labourers from Kumaon and Nepal cook and sleep in improvised tin-sheds at the work-site. They live in dust and they eat dust. Work begins at dawn and continues till six in the evening, with a break for the mid-day meal. For long hours of backbreaking work with primitive implements and strike-the-fuse-and-run rock blasting, they are paid IRs 25 a day.

This winter, GMVN employees were proud that work on the pillar bases had been completed without an upward revision in costs. The contractors seemed pleased as well. I was left wondering if the Nigam, Triveni Structurals and contractors had taken into account what seemed to me to be the non-calculable costs: months of reckless blasting on fragile mountainsides; the deep gashes on meadows; the travails of migrants forced to do hazardous work for low wages. How could things like these ever be cos ted and paid for? Or did the ultimate goal of a sanitised winter tourist resort make up for all this?

Skiing started in Auli in 1985 and in the beginning the facilities were rudimentary. For three winters, ski instructors Mr. Rawat and Mr. Nagi (one of the first professional instructors in the country) lived in the potato-farmers' huts.

Today, there are four dormitories built of pre-fabricated materials brought in from Dehra Dun. There are also two octagonal 'cottages' and a dining hall and kitchen made of concrete with roofs of tin. These constructions are miserable eyesores. Two of the dormitories already leak. Somewhere, a door has come off its hinges; elsewhere, windows are about to fall. The near future should reveal how much sand has gone into concrete and how much money into various pockets.

Imagination appears to have been absent when these buildings were conceived. Their gaudy pinks, yellows and greens standout against the soft meadows of Auli as you emerge from the forest above Joshimath. In winter months, with snow all around, the buildings exude no warmth.

RECKLESS OPENING

In the early 1890s, when skiing first gained popularity in Europe, no o ne in the Alps imagined how this sport would develop, nor what its impact would be on life in the Alps and on the alpine environment. We are born to re-learn mistakes again and again, and the problems of Alpine skiing seem likely to be repeated as skiing resorts overtake the Himalaya, spearheaded by the prototype at Auli.

The first cable cars for transporting skiers began to appear in the Alps just before World War I. However, it was only after World War II that downhill (or "alpine") skiing began to monopolise the Alps. To fulfil the demands of downhill skiing, roads were cut through virgin tracts. Concrete parking lots replaced the green of forest clearings. Cable cars, chairs and T-bar lifts fanned out on the slopes to make vast areas accessible to skiers in a single day. As slopes began to be "prepared", large rocks and bushy clumps of Alpine roses and berries were cleared to make way for "ski-freeways".

In the excitement of post-war reconstruction, there was a recklessness in the way the Alps were opened up. Little thought was given to the effect on the sensitive physical and cultural landscape. Only in the late 1970s, when forests were seen to be dying at least partly due to the exhaust fumes from motor vehicles, and reports of disappearing birds and plants, did some people wake up to the ruthless colonisation of the Alps by no-holds-barred skiing.

Not every farmer in the Alps has given up farming, nor all cowherds and shepherds their herds and flocks. The making of cheese and butter on Alpine pastures in summer is still widespread in parts of Austria and Italy. But the lives of the Alpine villagers have certainly been affected. Suddenly, in the middle of a ski run, one passes abandoned huts and meadows on which herders no longer 'summer' their animals because the pastures have been destroyed by the slopes.

DISCOVERING CROSS COUNTRY

Far from arguing that skiing be discouraged in our region, I think more and more people should enjoy the pleasures of the sport and not an exclusive few.. The point at issue is, simply, what kind of skiing is worth encouraging, and at what cost? Downhill skiing is only one kind of skiing. There is also cross country skiing.

In the Alps, I began to feel bored queueing up for lifts, being pulled to the top of mountains, and coming down on skis and going up again. It was around this time that I started going on cross country ski tours in Tirol. I learnt to glide up mountains on skis without slipping back. I began to feel free of lifts, and the prepared slopes of packed and hard snow. Instead, I could go through forests, where the snow was fluffy like cotton-wool. I could go on any mountain I wished and decide for myself the path of my descent.

This was not the hectic up-and-down skiing amidst crowds milling around hotels, lifts and slopes, planned by colonisers and developers. On a tour, I could ski and explore the mountains as they were, in winter's moods. It was like walking the hills on foot in summer, drawing closer to the joys, dangers and sorrows of wilderness. This is not the way downhill skiing tames the wilderness: downhill skiing refuses to let the mountains be.

Touring the Alps on my cross country skis, I dreamt of roaming the bugyals of Garhwal on skis in winter. Free of the hegemony of downhill skiing, I looked forward to Himalayan snows — to spend solitary hours on my skis at Auli itself, under the blissful gaze of Nanda Devi.

GOING DOWNHILL

Auli's development is not informed by the experience in the Alps. The GMVN is hell-bent on developing only downhill skiing at Auli-Gorson, and its plans do not show any regard for the local hill society, nor the natural environment. The major ropeway project is already underway. Three smaller lifts will cover the slopes of Auli. Three- and five-star hotels are to be built by private parties on the meadows below the forests.

The meadows of grass and flower are already severely wounded. Ascending hordes of humans will soon drive the last snow foxes and monal pheasants away. And what will happen; come summer, to the shepherds and their centuries-old practice of pasturing their flocks on these bugyals? And to potato-growing village folk who gave "Auli" its name?

When GMVN chose downhill skiing as its model for developing Auli, it did so mindlessly. It has appeared blind to the ruin it will bring in its wake to the mountains whose society it was supposed to safeguard and con serve. The Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam is behaving as if the mountains are its private resource to develop any which way it likes. But these mountains, these pastures and their people, were here before the GMVN and its officials arrived on the slopes of Auli.

Mangalik has lived and skied in the South Tirol mountains of Austria. He latest visit to Auli was in late March.