Bet on students, not tourists

In Uttarakhand, the second season of the “winter Char Dham’” has just begun.

- KANIKA DATTA

This is the state government’s way of ensuring all-round religious tourism, maximising revenue from the business. Last year, about 30,000 pilgrims visited the winter abodes of the deities, which are situated in the lower reaches of the Himalayas. Just like last year, this year too, winter Char Dham will be making its contribution to the piles of garbage, much of it plastic, adorning the mountainsides and to the general environmental degradation that accompanies the business of housing and transporting pilgrims to the sacred sites. None of this appears to bother the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state government. But the asymmetry between religion as a business and as a spiritual exercise has never been wider.

The sites of the “winter Char Dham” are Kharsali (for Yamunotri), Mukhba (Gangotri), Ukhimath (Kedarnath) and Pandukeshwar (Badrinath). Like their summer counterparts that play host to five to six million pilgrims, all four winter sites face substantial and growing environmental threats owing to their fragile ecology and impacts of climate change. Tourism and “development” (read jerrybuilt hotels, rest houses and restaurants) have added their mite to the impending crisis that manifests itself periodically in flash floods and landslides. Pandukeshwar is about 24 km from Joshimath, the town that has been steadily sinking due to over-development but has been blessed by an official renaming to its ancient name, Jyotirmath, last year.