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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 —

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.