Even as rescue workers raced against time to save lives in Wayanad, invites and incitements to tourists to visit the region hustled uninterrupted on social media. This is one of the most landslide-prone areas of the Western Ghats. With Tuesday’s landslides taking over 150 lives, govts’ failure to mitigate its well-known ecological vulnerabilities is sharply, and justly, in focus today. But an unregulated tourist boom has also played a key role in the ghatastrophe. This factor deserves all the more attention, because it is seen wreaking havoc across several environmental hotspots in the country.
That many homestays and resorts which got destroyed were located right on river banks, ‘without providing any room for the river’, is reminiscent of how buildings constructed in floodplains got swept away during the 2013 Kedarnath floods. Uttarakhand has hardly corrected course since then. Tourism bucks and real estate greed are still seen running rampant. Whether travellers come looking for physical or spiritual adventures, they become part of the same traffic jams and garbage mountains. Tiger reserves to oncepristine beaches, too often the scene is sadly the same. They crowd onto railway tracks to see Dudhsagar Falls, make Darjeeling run short of drinking water, make Ooty feel indistinguishable from Bengaluru.
