Choked arteries, clogged towns

In peak season and on most weekends now, vehicles pile up at bottlenecks where eight-lane highways, bringing a legion of cars from Delhi and adjoining areas, shrink upon touching the hilly terrain. This results in hours of traffic jams, heightened air pollution, and chaotic scenes at roundabouts. Rishikesh today is a far cry from the salubrious station that once attracted sages and stars alike — from Swami Vivekananda to the Beatles.

“Rishikesh, Haridwar, and Dehradun form a triangle. A journey from one to another would generally take 45 minutes to 1 hour. Now you can find yourself stranded for hours on end,” says Manmohan Bhatt, a local journalist.

That is precisely not what Sanjeev Vatsalya bargained for when he left his well-paying job in the US to build a home for himself here in 2002. Uttarakhand, comprising the hill districts of Kumaon and Garhwal divisions and the Tarai belt of Haridwar and Nainital, had just been carved out of Uttar Pradesh.

The newly crafted hill state offered an attractive second-home option to many. Two decades later, the situation has reached such a pass that locals in Rishikesh often dread venturing out.

“It would take 45 minutes to 1 hour for my children to reach school, a distance of 5 to 6 kilometres,” Vatsalya says. Unable to tolerate any more of the gridlocks, snarls, and congestion, he and his family moved to Rajasthan.

Kathgodam’s crowded corridor

About 300 kms southeast of the capital, Dehradun, is the second major gateway to the Uttarakhand hills — Kathgodam, which was once a forest department depot and also the last point of rail connectivity for the Kumaun division. For tourists visiting Nainital, Almora, or the upper reaches like Pindari Glacier, Kathgodam is the point of entry.

Unlike the pilgrimage sites of the Gharwal hills, the temples in the Kumaon hills are dedicated mostly to local deities. Except for the Kailash Mansarovar yatris, who take this route (and their numbers are in thousands), religious tourism here has been significantly less compared to the middle- and high-income travellers who want to stroll on the Nainital Mall abutting the emerald-green lake.

Pilgrimage 2.0:
Jageshwar & Kainchi

Post-Covid, the profile of the tourists visiting the Kumaon belt has changed in the last five years, as two major pilgrimage spots have started to attract lakhs of yatris.

The first is Jageshwar — a group of 125 post-Gupta and pre-medieval Shiva temples interspersed over a 7 km stretch amidst towering deodars. Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2023 visit to Jageshwar, the footfall of pilgrims in this once secluded sanctuary, 35 kms from Almora, has risen exponentially.

The Kainchi Dham, 15 kms from Nainital, is the second destination that is drawing huge crowds. The temple, which derives its name from the approach road with multiple hairpin bends that appear like a pair of scissors from the hilltop, was established as a small ashram in the mid-sixties by Baba Neem Karauli, a mystic saint who frequented the area.

Now, Kainchi, on one of the main arterial roads that connects Delhi and Lucknow with the remote towns and villages in the hills, is a traffic nightmare. There is hardly any parking space to accommodate thousands of private vehicles that arrive from as far as Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.

Local economies tend to benefit from a surge in tourist inflow. But when it becomes a problem of plenty, the populace not directly linked to the tourism industry begins to feel the resource crunch as the cost of living shoots up.

Social scientists call it overtourism. In Uttarakhand too, there appear to be telltale signs of precocious tensions and fault lines emerging between the locals and the visitors, between the domiciles and the outsiders.

In an incident reported from Mussoorie in the first week of June, despite a police escort, a senior citizen who fell ill could not make it alive to the nearest hospital due to traffic congestion. It took almost an hour to reach the medical facility that was just 4 km away.

On June 9, a 40-year-old man from Nainital district died when the ambulance transporting him to the hospital got stuck in a traffic jam near Kainchi Dham. The journey to the hospital, which generally takes two hours, took almost 5 hours.

The same day, a bunch of undergraduate students from Kumaun University, on their way to Nainital to appear for their semester exams, were stuck in a traffic congestion near Kainchi. They could not make it to the examination centre on time and missed their paper.

“The traffic management is so poor that on some days we are not able to visit the local market, which is just 3 km from my house on a two-wheeler,” says Sanjeev Bhagat, who runs a shop on Bhimtal-Bhowali road.

Tourism’s paradox

Ironically, the hotel industry, which should benefit the most from the surging crowds, is far from satisfied with the current state of affairs.

“Traffic congestion has led to tourists being stranded hours on end,” says Praveen Sharma, a Nainital hotelier who says many hotels in Nainital, Kausani, and Mussoorie reported low occupancy during peak season.

A majority of the visitors are religious tourists who prefer affordable lodges over hotels, or sometimes spend the night in their vehicles.

“Big travel operators in Kolkata and Mumbai have started to dissuade travellers from visiting Uttarakhand during summer as tourist groups have reported being stuck in jams for hours on end,” adds Ratan Singh Aswal, a Dehradun-based social activist.