Travel  Discussion Forum

Let' s face it... India has immense tourism potential. But the frenzy of haphazard development that we have unleashed on our tourist places is similar to killing the proverbial golden goose.

Visit Mahableshwar, Nainital, Manali or Kodaikanal and all you see is a beautiful scenic spot that is gasping under the burden of unsightly gaudy hotels, billboards, tin shacks, shanties, open sewages, dust, dirt, grime, and the pompous, nouveau rich tourist with his insatiable appetite for kitsch, stomping all over. travel_tramp replied. I agree with Ramesh that it is possible to retain the intrinsic beatuy of a tourist spot when you develop it. I doint know about Frankfurt, but a good example is Bhutan. India could learn a lot from this neighbour of ours. Ramesh replied. I disagree with Cinderella. Its more of a mentality problem. I mean look at places like Frankfurt, the germans maintain the black forest very well not allowing for tourism to affect it catastrophically. The environment in the alps is amazing and you dont see the littering and crowding you experience in India Jacen replied. I think there should be more effort to do a kind of systematic development for tourism in these areas. Avoiding development is inevitable. So something along the lines of dili Haat. Something that serves the tourists needs yet isnt congested and trashy. Agreed there are so many small shops these days all crowding around these hill stations. But if the market are is planned well, paved well and organized things might actually look nice. Instead theres litter on the roads often. Cinderella replied. Man' s dirty inventions and desires will continue to destroy whatever little natural beauty we have left. There are so few of us who wish that a stop be put to ' development' . Me for one would like to turn the clock back twenty years and make time stand still. But then what would happen to computers, mobile phones, all the great advances of the modern age? The moral of the story is that you cannot have one without the other. We have a choice - a hard nomadic life with beauty or a convinient, rich life surrounded by dirt. alas, too many people choose the latter. and i cannot help but feel that there is nothing we can do to stop it..