Tourism in Himachal’s Himalayan districts has surged, especially after the Atal Tunnel opened Lahaul to year-round visitors.
While homestays and trekking routes have boosted local incomes, the boom strains fragile ecosystems through emissions, waste and water stress.
Only people-owned, community-governed tourism rooted in Community Forest Rights can balance livelihoods with conservation and social justice.
In the fragile, breath-taking landscapes of the Indian Himalayas, tourism has become a powerful economic driver. Over the past decade, regions like Kullu and Lahaul districts and the Seraj area of Mandi district in the Himachal Pradesh have transformed from remote mountain settlements into vibrant destinations. Visitors now seek homestays offering local hospitality, trekking routes through pristine forests and cultural immersion with indigenous communities.
While this transformation has created livelihoods and lifted many families out of subsistence living, it has also raised an urgent question: Who truly owns and governs the natural resources that sustain tourism? The answer will determine whether Himalayan tourism becomes a source of shared prosperity or a path to ecological ruin and social conflict. This article argues for a fundamental shift toward people-owned, people-governed tourism — anchored in Community Forest Rights (CFR) — as the only logical path forward.
The inauguration of the Atal Tunnel in October 2020 marked a turning point for Lahaul Valley. By providing year-round connectivity to Manali, it ended Lahaul’s winter isolation and opened it to a massive flow of visitors. Tourist numbers tell the story: Around 130,000 in 2019, dropping to 50,000 in 2020 due to COVID-19, then rebounding to 300,000 in 2021, 740,000 in 2022, 980,000 in 2023, and surpassing one million in 2024. This is a clear, sustained upward trajectory driven primarily by domestic tourism.
This growth has created new opportunities in transportation, hospitality, and small-scale services. However, it has also intensified pressure on the fragile Himalayan ecosystem. Research cited in media highlighted increased vehicular emissions — particularly nitrogen oxides, methane, and black carbon. Black carbon deposition on snow reduces albedo, accelerates glacier melt and contributes to long-term hydrological changes. Meanwhile, tourism-linked infrastructure and waste generation have heightened risks of landslides, flash floods and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF). Water stress and solid waste management have become daily challenges for local communities.
In a region already vulnerable to climate change, the speed and scale of tourism growth make it urgent to rethink governance and ownership.
Tourism in the Himalayas thrives entirely on the region’s ecological wealth — dense deodar and pine forests, perennial rivers, snow-capped peaks and alpine meadows. These are not private assets. They are commons: Resources that belong to communities by tradition, custom and increasingly by law.
Under CFR provisions of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, communities have the legal right to govern, manage and benefit from the forests they have conserved for generations. In parts of Himachal Pradesh, such as Banjar in Kullu district, several Gram Sabhas have successfully claimed these rights. However, the real challenge lies not in legal recognition but in realisation: Ensuring these rights translate into meaningful governance and tangible economic benefits.
In many areas, including Lahaul, the CFR recognition process is still underway. Even where titles exist, tourism continues to operate largely as a private, individual-led enterprise, while the ecological foundations remain collectively owned. This creates a structural disconnect:
Economic gains from tourism (hotel bookings, guide fees) are concentrated among a few individuals or outside investors.
Community institutions, including Gram Sabhas and CFR Management Committees, have little or no control over tourism practices or visitor behaviour.
Contributions to conservation of the commons are minimal, voluntary, and rarely institutionalised.
CFR rights remain severely underutilised as a tool for shaping local economies.
This disconnect is not merely inefficient — it is an increasing source of tension. When communities witness their forests being used for commercial gain without their consent or benefit, the social licence for tourism begins to erode.
To address this gap, tourism must be reframed, not as an external industry imposed upon mountain landscapes, but as an integral component of the forest-based community economy. This shift has significant practical implications for governance, benefit-sharing, and conservation.
Tourism is fundamentally an ecological service. Its market value derives directly from the beauty, biodiversity and cultural richness of forested landscapes shaped and protected by communities over centuries. A well-managed forest produces not only timber and honey, but also scenic trails, clean water and wildlife habitats. Those who benefit from tourism must therefore invest in sustaining the forests that make it possible.
This approach emphasises securing tenure rights, formalising forest-based livelihoods, building community enterprises and promoting women-led economic activities.
If tourism depends on community-owned ecological resources, it must actively contribute to their conservation and management. This requires a shift from an extractive model, where visitors consume experiences and businesses extract profits, to a contributory and accountable system in which tourism sustains the commons. This approach is described as people-owned and people-governed tourism.
Under this model, tourism becomes community-driven rather than being controlled by distant travel agencies or corporate chains. It is ecologically responsible instead of extractive and wasteful, and it is inclusive, creating explicit opportunities for women, youth, and marginalised groups. Crucially, it is institutionally anchored through Gram Sabhas, CFR Management Committees and traditional community institutions.
Several concrete steps can help realise this vision. Gram Sabhas and CFR Management Committees must be formally recognised as legitimate authorities in tourism governance, with the power to approve or restrict commercial activities within their forest areas. Tourism enterprises should be required to contribute to community-managed conservation funds, for instance through a mandated conservation fee per visitor.
Local norms for sustainable practices must be established, including limits on group sizes, clear waste disposal rules, and seasonal closures during wildlife breeding periods or monsoon-related risks. In addition, equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms should be ensured so that even households not directly engaged in tourism receive a fair share of the revenue generated from common resources.
This approach is not about restricting tourism. On the contrary, a well-governed and sustainable model can attract environmentally conscious travellers, command premium pricing, and build long-term resilience against climate change and market volatility.
One of the most promising pathways lies in linking tourism with Non-Timber Forest Produce (NTFP). Himalayan forests are rich in medicinal plants, wild edibles, and natural dyes. By integrating these products into tourism markets, through homestay shops, local cafes and curated visitor experiences, communities can diversify income sources and reduce dependence on a single tourism season.
Such integration also promotes women-led enterprises, as women are often the primary collectors and processors of NTFPs. At the same time, it strengthens the local economy while reducing ecological pressure, since visitors are encouraged to purchase locally sourced forest products rather than imported souvenirs.
When a household earns income both from guiding treks and from selling forest products such as wild honey collected along those routes, its incentive to protect the forest is significantly strengthened.
For successfully integrating tourism within the CFR framework, policymakers must explicitly recognise tourism as a legitimate component of the forest economy within CFR guidelines. For practitioners, it calls for sustained investment in legal literacy and community capacity-building. For communities, it presents an opportunity to assert their role not merely as service providers, but as custodians of both nature and economy.
Chitta Ranjan Pani is an independent researcher on livelihood and natural resource governance. Sandeep Minhas has been working in the Himalayan region for more than two decades and is the Managing Trustee, People for Himalayan Development, Himachal Pradesh.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.