Last week a controversy erupted in Kashmir after the Jammu Kashmir government ordered the hoteliers to cancel all the bookings in the last week of February. The order was issued by the Director Tourism after the Union government decided to organize the Khelo India games at a high altitude tourist destination at Gulmarg in North Kashmir. This triggered anger among the hoteliers who said that it will force them to incur huge losses since the bookings have taken place months before. Eventually the order was revoked and hoteliers expressed their satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the Khelo India games are not happening for the first time in Kashmir. During the last winter, Khelo India was organized at Gulmarg only to conclude midway after an outbreak of Coronovirus. Otherwise, the event had grabbed much needed attention and was going on smoothly with the Union Minister for Sports and many other top dignitaries arriving at the venue.
What prompted initially this year to Directorate tourism to ask hoteliers to cancel bookings and leave hotels open for events is yet to be known. If he needed the space and cancellation of bookings was the only option, why did he change his mind later is yet another question to fathom. Kashmir’s tourism industry is a huge sector contributing around 6 per cent to UT’s economy.
However, it is massively unorganized with minimum efforts by successive regimes to tap its full potential. One of the hoteliers in a press conference recently claimed that Kashmir has a capacity to accommodate five million tourists simultaneously. The figure was highly exaggerated and far from the facts.
The room capacity as per official data is 70000 in entire Kashmir. Any bumper tourism season leaves hundreds of more tourists to cancel their plans following the non availability of hotel rooms. While Khelo India was a too small event to seek the cancelation of bookings, however, to expand the scope of the tourism sector and ensure footfalls increase in coming times substantially, the sector needs a massive overhaul.
Alongside the hotels, the home stay concept shall be promoted and villages must be identified and designated as tourist villages with adequate facilities. This will not only decentralize the dividends of the sector to the last man of the valley, it will also discourage unnecessary constructions at an ecologically fragile place. The natural beauty will also remain intact.
It needs a considerate attention otherwise; any rush to promote tourism with no proper ground work may prove catastrophic ecologically.
