It's simple ... No Nature, no tourism
A decade ago, the people who coined `God's own country' as the
destination call for Kerala,
didn't quite realise what they had hit upon. Kerala had quietly
staged a coup. Now, with the kind
of attention tourism in this part of the country is getting,there
is concern about the way policy
initiatives are being shaped. What should the State do, asks
HARIHARAN
CHANDRASHEKAR, as the key to its tourism sweepstakes lies in
the protection of its natural
resources?
Too heavy a burden?
GOING to Kerala is always a pleasure. People say there's trouble
with its labour force; that getting
anything done is near impossible. But everything seems to work
well enough for the visitor — the
food, the ambience; even the humidity — while oppressive — is
kept at bay by air conditioners
that work. Kerala has its spurts of power shutdown, but it isn't
as bad as it is in Karnataka, or
worse, Uttar Pradesh. If you've had to live with eight hours
of power cuts a day, then you'll know.
The people who coined "God's own country" as the destination
call for Kerala didn't quite realise
what they had hit upon. Ministers and bureaucrats in other States
are chewing their nails over the
coup that Kerala staged eight or nine years ago. Come to think
of it, even the Keralites didn't quite
know what had come their way when, a couple of years ago, the
National Geographic Traveller,
the prestigious Canada-based international travel magazine billed
the State as one of the world's top
50 destinations.
The Government patted itself on its back for work that it thought
it had done. But, in actuality, it
was the culmination of the sustained effort of many small but
inventive entrepreneurs who had
carved for themselves a unique niche for offering hospitality
without the trammels of the organised
industry. This groundswell had begun back in the late 1980s.
They found they could set
themselves up in business with cottages on the backwaters or
in the hills that could invite a few
travel agencies to bring in the spillover tourist traffic from
Goa. The Arab tourist was also a
tourism revenue earner — remember those years when you had these
sporadic reports of lascivious
Sheikhs and their penchant for the lissom lasses of Kerala?
Meanwhile, around the globe, the big tourist traffic from the
Continent was getting bored with the
Sea-Sand-Surf (not to forget the fourth `S') formula that Cancun
in Mexico and Thailand's Pattaya
offered. It wanted more. It found Goa to be congested. So it
looked southward and the traffic to
Kerala began to swell.
From a measly 29,000 overseas tourists in 1979 places, the number
rose to 225,000 in 2000.
Through the 1990s the number steadily rose, thanks to the steady
growth of a generation of small
tourist home offerings in the hills and the wetlands. Now things
are not quite the same. As the
number has swelled, the attention that tourism has got from
the Government and the big business
houses has made the small and medium entrepreneurs a trifle
uneasy. They now find the big guns
of tourism want a place under the Kerala sun. The Government
wants a piece of the action, too.
What was once a lacklustre posting for the IAS officer has now
become a coveted job. Kerala's
tourism secretary and director and the director of eco-tourism
are sought-after people today. Prof.
Thomas, Minister of Tourism holds another forgettable portfolio,
and nobody quite knows what
that is.
As Jose Dominic of the Casino group of hotels, pioneers in some
ways of Kerala's leadership
initiatives, says, "The Government's spending on tourism development
last year was Rs. 80
crores. Now it wants to up this figure to a staggering Rs.1,000
crores to be spent over the next
three to five years. That can spell disaster if we are all not
on the guard."
God's country is in for a series of shocks. Being a leader is
a lonesome job. And Kerala simply has
no precedent in the country to inspire it to new directions.
The big spurt in visitor traffic to the
State, which has for many years been a "money-order economy",
has meant the Government is
desperately clutching at the tourism straw. The State missed
the industry business in the 1970s —
mercifully so, for it has suffered the least environment impact
from the conventional manufacturing
industry. There's hardly any talk of pollution of its dozens
of rapid, westward flowing rivers from
industrial effluents. The natural resource has remained relatively
untouched, unexploited.
So what should Kerala do? Should it take models of tourism from
the West and transplant them
without thought to the unique features of the State's various
micro-regions? Should it adopt a
"do-nothing" stance, which will protect its excellent natural
resources and help the tourist traffic
keep coming? Should it take the Small and Medium Enterprise
route that has paid such rich
dividends in the past, and keep the big players and big revenue
models out of its tourism
development models?
There is concern at the Government's policy initiatives that
display the timidity of the herd and,
admittedly, a lack of sensitivity to Kerala's fragile economic
resources. Thenmala, a sanctuary that
had remained a quiet getaway, is receiving excessive attention,
as the Government is likely to
develop the lush valley as a destination. Periyar has already
gone that way. Baikal is still a sleepy
little town to the north of Kerala that boasts of no more than
an ancient fort and a lovely coastline,
where the wild waters of the sea tirelessly pound the shores.
Its tranquillity will soon be lost,
though, if the Government went ahead with its current business
plan for developing the historic
town into a tourism enclave.
The High Ranges...How long will Kerala's natural
resources remain untouched?
The next three years will see a rude awakening for Baikal. Some
1,200-1,400 acres of land has been
secured by the Government and have been offered to a host of
tourism entrepreneurs — the big
ones. The Taj and the Oberoi groups have shown interest. Homegrown
entrepreneurs like Jose
Dominic are skirting clear of it because the model is scary.
What they'll have is what Malaysia got
in Penang, or Thailand got in Pattaya. A huge strip of coast
clogged with restaurants and hotels
that will be factories producing mountains of garbage every
day.
Besides, that kind of international traffic no longer exists.
The Three `S' segment of tourists has
dwindled worldwide. The discerning tourist or traveller who
is seeking to share the local
experience has burgeoned over the last decade to as much as
55 per cent on global traffic profiles.
Besides, right there in Thiruvananthapuram's backyard, Kovalam's
66 hotels and tonnes of garbage
stand as a stark example of the maladies of such mainstream
tourism.
THE stakeholders in the tourism game are many — the Government,
tourism entrepreneurs, the
local communities and the tourists themselves. But the passive
resources they're all dependent on
are Kerala's lush hills, its placid backwaters, its beautiful
seaboards, its breathtaking arts and crafts
— that have existed for millennia, and need to be protected,
for long-term reasons of helping
another generation inherit what exists as natural resources,
as well as the more practical reason that
there can be no tourism in Kerala without its natural resources.
The exigencies of the tourism business, and the revenue that
the Government sees as potential from
it all, is only incidental. The key to Kerala tourism's sweepstakes
is the protection and
conservation of the bio-diversity of its amazing natural resources.
The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)-Kerala organised,
on May 27-28, a conference on
eco-tourism that served as a sort of sanity check on where the
State's tourism is, and where it
should be headed. Every stakeholder in the game was invited
for a pow-wow on the directions that
need to be charted.
The Keralite's insouciance, his wit, his cynicism and his ability
to soul-search never ceases to
surprise any outsider who ventures into the State. From the
lowly loaders and packers, to the
people who preside over the destiny of the State, there's vigour
in thinking. There's constant
probing and self-examination. Criticism is measured; cynicism
arises out of a basic desire to
believe in good values, and so is very healthy. Almost everybody
who has anything to do with
tourism aspires for some very lofty objectives and ideas. And
as the old saying goes, "Aim at the
skies, and there's a good chance you'll hit at least the tree."
The tourism industry, the development model enthusiasts, the
Government's tourism department,
the district tourism promotion councils, adventure groups —
almost everybody in the business —
seek to establish a set of governing guidelines for the long
term. It's important that the State's
tourism ministry evolves a policy that is institutionalised,
and one that remains unhampered for at
least a decade.
For the first time there is realisation that there is the real
threat of policy or programme excesses
that may spell disaster for the State's rich natural resources.
Tourism in Kerala thrives not thanks
to any sites of religious or historic significance. All it has
are the lush Western Ghats, the wetlands
and backwaters in the 280-km long plains that run from north
almost down to the peninsular tip,
and the lovely natural beaches. There is still no realisation
that tourism growth would falter if
Kerala's scenic splendour were lost, even if that will take
some doing.
Across the board, the general consensus among many leaders of
the tourism business, and other
stakeholders is that a framework has to be evolved which will
sharply enhance discerning awareness
among all people of the strategic necessity today of pitch forking
Kerala's current pattern of
conventional tourism into a set of discerning, eco-sensitive
tourism packages. The various
stakeholder agencies — from industry to government to local
communities — at the CII conference
emerged with a consensus. The salient recommendations likely
to be posited before the
Government range from the noble to the strategic. Some of them
are —
Protection and preservation of bio-diversity of Kerala's
eco-habitats should be the keystone of all
tourism policy initiatives.
Tourism in Kerala should be synonymous with eco-sensitive tourism.
All policy pronouncements should seek the approval of all
stakeholders and should be
transparent.
The Government should not look at regulation and licensing
of the tourism industry, which will
only lead to destroying the long-term objectives.
Greater trust in the spirit of human endeavour of small
and medium tourism entrepreneurs will
go a long way to engender sensitive tourism.
Tourism plans should be centred on what the land, people,
the cultures have to offer, and not
pander to the tourists' needs.
Accent should be on facilitating cultural exchange and true exposure to Kerala and its values.
All stakeholders, including the Government, should adopt
a do-nothing posture as far as Kerala's
natural resources (which is the big tourist draw) is concerned.
In the tourism game, there has been
a display of lofty ideas and objectives.
Opportunistic approaches should give place to strategic
approaches that are firmly rooted in
sustainable business practices.
As the Kozhikode-based Tommy Mathews, a soft-spoken, but well-meaning,
exponent of these
refreshing and strategically far-sighted approaches, says, "You
cannot showcase Kerala's unique
symbiosis of cultures, its festivities, its performing arts,
its fragile, but resplendent, environment.
All our tourism brochures and their hard-sell cannot work if
you don't sensitise the backdrop."
So what's that Experience that Kerala offers? How does one position
this Other Kerala in ways that
its lure for tourists strengthens? How do you get every stakeholder
to see that tourism cannot exist
if they don't have this unique experience, which Kerala's forests
and wetlands, crafts and heritage
offer?
With all that as they are, you cannot take away this one fact
— there's ferment among thinking and
concerned people over the State's tourism sweepstakes. Will
they forge new directions? Will they
buckle under the onslaught of greed of unschooled entrepreneurs
or of the bureaucracy and
Government? Only Kerala's own destiny-shapers can mould those
answers.
The writer is head of Biodiversity Conservation (India) Ltd.,
and an avid watcher of Kerala's
tourism economy.