Recipe for disaster in Uttarakhand: 1 crore population, 2.5 crore tourists

Are you surprised by the staggering number of people, many from across India, who are stranded in calamity-stricken Uttarakhand?

By Subodh Varma, TNN | Updated: Jun 23, 2013, 10.45 AM IST

Recipe for disaster in Uttarakhand: 1 crore population, 2.5 crore tourists

NEW DELHI: Are you surprised by the staggering number of people, many from across India, who are stranded in calamity-stricken Uttarakhand? The reason is quite simple: in a state with a total population of just over 1 crore, the number of tourists visiting it is 2.5 crore, both figures being for 2011. And most of these tourists visit the mountain state in summer.

Put this together with the fact that rainfall in Uttarakhand was 440% more than normal till June 18 this year, on a land already under pressure and one can begin to understand the colossal dimensions of this tragedy.

Tourism is a huge opportunity for the people of the state, especially those living near the popular circuits like the Alaknanda valley, Mussoorie, or the lake district of Nainital. Three fourths of the population depends on failing agriculture, which is growing at less than 2% per year. Average land holding size is a mere 0.68 ha, that too divided into several patches on slopes. So people turn to tourism making it into a lifeline—three months of work to survive the whole year.

But it has driven the state into a blind alley. To service tourists, hotels, shops, restaurants, parking lots and mini-malls have sprung up not just on roadsides, but even on river beds, crumbling slopes and forest areas. Land revenue has declined Rs 15.6 crore in 2006-07 to Rs 8 crore estimated this year, but stamp and registration fees have shot up from Rs 546 crore to 640 crore, giving a measure of the way farm land is being gobbled up for tourist use.

There is no regulatory body to oversee land use, especially in non-urban areas, says Dinesh Pratap, professor of geography at Dehradun's DAV College.

"If a villager has some agricultural land near the national highway going towards Badrinath, he can sell it at lucrative prices to developers, who will set up a restaurant or hotel on it. If the land slopes downwards to the river, he will put some pillars and build. There is no map, plan or layout," Pratap says. The state's Town and Country Planning Department says that it has 22 regulated areas in the state. Master plans have been made for just 9 of the areas falling in the hills.

"But the plans exist only on paper, or they are fundamentally flawed" says Pratap. He cites the example of the state capital itself where many prominent buildings including the jail, the university, the radio station and the helipad are located on flood plains of the river. The grandiose building of the Sashastra Seema Bal in Srinagar which was destroyed by the raging Alaknanda was also located on the river bank. Nearly 10,000 hectares of forest land have been encroached upon till 2012, according to official statistics of the state's forest department.

Another ticking time bomb is the so called be-naap (unmeasured) land in villages that used to belong to gram panchayats but was taken away and vested in the forest department in 1996. The previous BJP government vested it with the revenue department under the control of the district administration.

"Although taking it away from the forest department was a good move because it had traditionally belonged to villagers, vesting it with the district administration may open up the Pandora's box of misuse, says Almora-based Ishwar Joshi, an activist with the Van Panchayat Sangharsh Samiti. "Four lakh hectares of be-naap land is no small change. It can be handed over to commercial interests because the people have no right over it. There is too much pressure of commercialization, and how will officials resist it?" he says.