India May Need to Take a Hard Decision on Pilgrimage Spots

Fragile Himalayan ecosystems call for restricting visitor inflows

- DAVID FICKLING

It's one of the world's fastest-growing tourist sites, attracting more visitors than the Statue of Liberty, the Tower of London, or Pompeii. It's also one of the locations most at risk from devastating natural disasters as our planet warms.

The Char Dham Yatra, a circuit of four of the most sacred Hindu sites in the foothills of the Himalayas, has grown in recent years to become one of the country's biggest annual pilgrimages.

These hills have also become the site of a grimmer spectacle: Flash floods and landslides, as unchecked development in rapidly thawing mountain valleys turns ever-intensifying rainstorms into avalanches of mud, rock and water. In the Indian state of Uttarakhand, at least four people died and dozens more were feared trapped or lost after one such cloudburst last week swept away much of the village of Dharali.

There's an inevitability about the location. The Char Dham Yatra is considered sacred because it takes pilgrims to shrines associated with the many tributaries of the Ganga river, which rises in Gangotri, just upstream from the latest disaster. Those waters in turn are fed by steep-sided river valleys, and ultimately by glaciers that have reportedly shrunk by about 40% since pre-industrial times.