{TEXTBOOK} the Hill Station Ebook
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THE HILL STATION PDF, EPUB, EBOOK J.G. Farrell | 256 pages | 05 Jul 2007 | Orion Publishing Co | 9781857990867 | English | London, United Kingdom 45 Uttarakhand Hill Stations - List of Hill Stations in Uttarakhand Darjeeling, which was famous for both tea and lush glory, is now a concrete jungle, stifled by tourist traffic. To make space for SUVs, picturesque walkways have been widened to make concrete roads in all hill stations. Vacation condos have come up, resulting in the cement trapping the ground water below. Sample this: An average of at least 4, and 5, tourist vehicles enter Manali and Shimla, respectively, every single day. Manali is worse. Along with constables, an equal number of homeguards are trying their best to bring order on roads. Nainital daily receives around 3, to 4, vehicles; their number rises to 6, on weekends. The city has only 2, parking slots. Ooty is no better. The burgeoning chocolate industry and connectivity with Bengaluru and Coimbatore have become the bane of this lost imperial paradise. Hotels have put up notices asking tourists to go back. Coorg is being slowly devastated by plantation tourism: imagine, there are 3, home stays of which hardly are on the government-approved list. The Karnataka Forest Department has restricted the number of trekkers on routes like Skandagiri and Kudremukh, which reeled under the trash epidemic. Up north, Uttarakhand has woken up to the implications of the traffic crisis. The Nainital administration has decided to stop incoming vehicles once parking space is full. They have a solution: park tourist vehicles outside city limits and construct a shuttle service to ferry them into town. However, a traffic line snaking over almost five km on three approach roads choked all movement. The Mussoorie Municipal Board is planning to construct four additional parking facilities. The city is struggling to control its weekend tourist traffic even though around additional traffic personnel have been deployed. Two years ago there was not a single shack along the km ride up from Dehradun. Now there are illegal shacks squeezing the heavy traffic into narrow arteries. If hill station roads are choked by traffic, the sidewalks are clogged by tourists. Twitter and Instagram were flooded last weekend with images of people sleeping in the open as hotels in Nainital and Mussoorie ran out of rooms. Almost 95 percent hotels in Shimla and 90 percent in Manali were full. Many tourists were forced to shelter at bus stands and when those ran out of space, slept on pavements. Even travellers with confirmed bookings did not have it easy. Kilometres-long traffic snarls lasting over five hours stopped many from reaching their destination—entire families slept in cars as they waited only to give up and drive back to city life, which suddenly seemed more inviting. The situation in the hills is similar. Forest land and plateaued hills have been cut down to construct massive resorts with tact official connivance. There are enough loopholes in the law to be exploited. Hill stations like Matheran in Maharashtra have woken up to bottlenecks and pollution. Only horses or toy trains can enter, or tourists can hike up to the town. Even if the place gets crowded, vehicular congestion is avoided. In the Nilgiris too, Ooty is chockablock with new hotels and markets, forcing hotel chains to seek space on the outskirts, thus eating into the green reserve of the mountains. Compared to last year, tourist flow has increased in the mountain ranges. Our tourism economy is based on numbers, and internet price wars boost traffic volumes the infrastructure cannot handle. There is no regulatory body controlling the number of hotel rooms per destination. Hence hotels have mushroomed all over the hills. And we are poor at self-regulation. With state governments doing little to roll back the damage, eco-volunters like Ankit Vasudevan work with many NGOs engaged in reviving tourist ravaged hill spots. In , Ankit and some friends had visited Mahabaleshwar. Trash was everywhere—casually discarded empty plastic bottles and packets. Sadiq Ali wants a committee involving local people to implement various ways to control traffic. Organisations such as Waste Warriors, Mountain Cleaners, Ecovita, Spiti Ecosphere are always looking for volunteers to clean up the hills. Difficult terrain and lack of garbage disposal means are challenges. An official study in Tamil Nadu found that around 50 percent of hotels discharge their grey non-toilet waste teeming with bacteria and chemicals directly into the vegetation around or open pits, thus polluting both the ground and ground water. Since the infected ground water is later used for drinking, cooking and gardening, humans and animals are at risk of disease. It is a biodiversity hot spot. We need to urgently preserve the town and the forests since the plains below get their water from the Western Ghats. However, empty plastic bags, food wrappers and plastic bottles are choking the earth near water bodies and forests. They definitely need to learn and cultivate sustainable travelling. The River Beas, which gave Alexander the Great sleepless nights, is a plastic dump now. A recent report notes that Manali produces about 10 tonnes of garbage daily; the quantity shoots up to 50 tonnes during peak season. Despite directions from the Himachal Pradesh High Court and the National Green Tribunal, no alternative spot has been allotted to dump the waste. The Kullu civic body installed a biomedical waste incinerator which ironically had to be shut down because residents complained about the odour. The off-beat Nag Tibba and the Pir Panjal range are littered with empty beer bottles, cans, disposable plastic plates and cups, food wrappers, empty juice tetra-packs. Trekkers discard junk in the forests, endangering the fragile ecosystem. With infrastructure in the major hill stations crumbling, Lonely Planet motorists head for satellite hill stations like Dharamshala and McLeodganj. Temporary bridges have been constructed to reach the twin towns and makeshift roadside hotels are taking drive-ins. As a result, many dejected tourists to McLeodganj are forced by traffic jams akin to Delhi-NCR to turn tail and head for other destinations. The fact that after a court ruling, the administration cracked down on illegal construction and hiked the parking fee for the outstation bus stop resulted in the bus company shutting down operations. And flat-footers from the plains, unfamiliar with hill driving, end up in dreadful and oftener-than-not fatal accidents. Sattal, a quaint little hill station near Nainital, takes its name from the cluster of seven lakes in the vicinity. The youth there have started a Sattal Conservation Club to address the issues of garbage accumulation, depleting green cover and the declining eco-system. The government has to step in with proper guidelines and policies which should percolate to the last level. Perhaps the most shocking image this summer was the one that went viral on Twitter: a traffic jam on Mount Everest. The image and a corresponding video shows a snaking queue of mountaineers almost glued to each other while they make their way to the summit, one inch at a time. Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay would have shaken their heads in disbelief and dismay—the Everest has become a tourist spot which rampant commercialisation has almost turned into a dump. More From The Web Sponsored. Opinion Opinion. What America's Thinking — 4d ago. Rising — 5d ago. What America's Thinking. Upgrade your WFH video calls with this camera accessories kit. 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From imperial stations, these towns and their lesser cousins are plagued by the maladies of cities in the plains. Shimla is a victim of progress. Every season, around one lakh tourists are added to its resident population of 1. The largest catastrophe to strike Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand is the mammoth water crisis in its hill towns. Its ecosystem is under severe stress, with low rainfall in winter and inadequate rain in summer bringing down natural reserves by half. Even when it rains in Nainital, Mussoorie and Ranikhet, no water conservation measures exist to check the run-offs. The annual International Shimla Summer Festival was postponed. Shimla resident Sanjay Thakur, who owns two hotels Marina and Comdere, is not convinced there is a water crisis in his town. Periodic confrontations between the state Irrigation Department and the Public Health Department in Shimla over the maintenance and supply of potable water have led to stagnation and contamination. Water tankers have become the norm in the city where Englishmen once fished in sparkling streams, as residents line up with buckets in summer. Water tankers charge Rs 4, each, and people are lucky if they get public water supply once in three or four days.