THE TROUBLE WITH TOURISM
Rashida lives with her family in a dirty, polluted area. Rats have begun to proliferate in the waterways, largely because of food remains discarded by nearby hotels.
Out on the streets, there are just too many people.
“When school finishes,” Rashida says, “there is such a rush and so much noise, people taking selfies ... it is hard to walk home. There is no space to move. We have to hold on tight to our children. There are just so many strangers everywhere.”
Tourism tends to be seen as a panacea for economic ills but it can have terrible fallouts for local communities
Rashida is a schoolteacher in Murree, a tourist-friendly hill station north-east of Islamabad.
Just a 1.5-hour drive away from the capital, Murree is a popular and quick getaway for long weekends for domestic travellers. This year on Eid-ul-Fitr, around 111,000 vehicles reportedly visited the area. Murree’s economy is almost entirely fuelled by tourism, generating revenue and creating thousands of jobs each year, but all at the expense of disrupting the daily lives of the residents there. The advent of tourism brought numerous problems for the locals, says Rashida, but people who run businesses welcomed it.
Almost universally, the thrust of tourism projects is on reordering local landscapes and cityscapes to suit the touristic imagination while ignoring the lived reality of the area for its inhabitants. This often means that the local infrastructure of schooling, medical facilities, energy provision and garbage removal, which affects the daily lives of communities, is not improved and the focus of development remains on creating entertainment for tourists.
While major tourist spots, such as Murree’s Mall Road, are kept clean, behind the buildings on the road, piles of garbage fester and filth and untreated sewage flows into streams and groundwater. Water pollution has become a serious problem for the inhabitants. In the recent monsoon season, Rashida had to buy bottled water for her family because of apprehensions about drinking water being unsafe for consumption.
Women and children living in Murree, in particular, have reduced mobility because of the hordes of strangers on the streets. Frequently, locals are not even able to access the entertainment or facilities provided for tourists, because they cannot afford them, or access is denied to them. They lack access to entertainment facilities within their own localities. Rashida recounts taking her children and visiting family members on a rare trip to a local picnic spot, but coming back disappointed because the area was clogged with tourist traffic.
In fact, Murree exemplifies the problems that result from large-scale tourism. Locals cite rapid urbanisation as the primary cause for deforestation in the area. In just the last 19 years, Murree’s constructed area has increased by around 22 percent, resulting in deforestation, rising temperatures and severe water shortages as levels of groundwater have fallen, according to a research paper on water policy by IWA Publishing. Many buildings sprang up to serve the needs of tourists and, at the same time, led to the area’s dwindling forest cover.
Increasing domestic tourism in the mountain valley of Hunza in Gilgit-Baltistan also raises concerns that the area will face the same ecological degradation that has occurred in Murree. The manner of growth of local business and unplanned urbanisation reveals the state’s neglect of local needs while tourist agendas are prioritised. Architect Sabuhi Essa, a native of Hunza’s Karimabad area, says, “Tourist business returns have blinded people to the long-term outcome of a massive growth of tourism.”