Tourists should tread lightly when borders reopen

As I experienced in India’s Himalayan valleys last week, states may be officially open but visitors are not welcomed with open arms, writes Adam Withnall

In the Himachal Pradesh region of India, borders may be open but locals are nervous of visitors (Getty/iStockphoto)

India has crossed another grim Covid-19 milestone – it now has more than 6 million cases, contributing 96,000 of the world’s 1 million deaths.

At the same time, the government is desperate to revive the economy and has opened up state borders for people to travel internally. Domestic flights are now in relatively full flow and the influential home minister Amit Shah took part in an event on Sunday promoting tourism to the country’s northeastern region.

Many countries are grappling with the conflicting motivations of rebuilding their economies and keeping coronavirus under control – India, still yet to open up international flights for tourists, is no exception.

But while the central government is keen to promote safe domestic tourism and potentially save millions of service industry jobs, there is resistance among host communities to a sudden influx of outsiders.

Last week I tested the limits of the newly reopened country with a visit to the Himalayan valleys of Himachal Pradesh state – all are welcome, and no Covid tests are required to travel, according to the authorities.

There, a 500km drive north of Delhi, large hotels proudly proclaimed themselves open to business. But off the main highways villagers were still very nervous. Respecting their wishes not to be disturbed made walking any distance in the hills all but impossible.

On the road itself there was a new unpleasant obstacle – traffic police and private contractors stopping cars one after the other, desperate to catch out any minor infringement of emergency coronavirus rules (different in each state), or complex state road taxes and toll charges. It seems state governments, strapped for cash, have dialled up their quotas on the amount to be extracted from road users.

For us journalists, the opening up of the country can only be a good thing – tomorrow, I’ll again be crossing a state border to conduct an interview in one of Delhi’s satellite cities, something so seemingly mundane would have been a bureaucratic nightmare just a few months ago.

But for when international flights do open up, to British visitors and others, my experience offers a warning – India as a whole may welcome tourists and their foreign currencies with (figurative) open arms, but Indians in more remote regions will, entirely understandably, be wary for a long time yet. Like other aspects of our post-Covid world, tourism will need to be approached with seriously managed expectations.

Yours, 

Adam Withnall 

Asia editor