Tourism impact melts snow in Rohtang

A popular Himalayan pass which attracts large tourists during the summers in Himachal Pradesh's scenic Kullu Valley is threatened due to overcrowding of tourist vehicles atop the pass.

The 3,915 metre high Rohtang Pass, some 55 km from the popular resort town of Manali, has never seen so little snow in early June.

Locals say the heavy winter and spring snow lasts well into July every year, but this year it has completely melted several weeks in advance disappointing holiday makers who throng the pass each day from nearby Manali.

Until a few years ago the pass would be cleared after seven months of heaps of accumulated heavy snow by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) in June, but due to less snowfall since the last five years the pass opened in May.

This year the pass was thrown to vehicular traffic on May 5. But the way the snow is melting the number of visitors is bound to decline in the coming months, people connected with the tourism trade in Manali said.

On the other hand, environmentalists have been attributing the heavy tourist traffic and exhaust fumes to damaging the fragile ecosystem of the Rohtang Pass.

The temperature on the Rohtang Pass in the scenic Kullu valley has gone up by at least a degree in the last three decades, hastening the melting of glaciers around the pass, said J C Kunihal, senior scientist at the Govind Ballabh Pant Environment Institute, Kullu.

According to Kunihal, during the peak tourist season in summer the traffic has almost doubled at the pass in the last three years alone. In 2003, around 650 vehicles drove up to the pass.Now around 1,000 vehicles drive up to the pass, from Manali, to return to resort town or cross the pass into the Lahaul-Spiti and Ladakh regions.

"The exhaust fumes of vehicles let out into the rarefied air is playing havoc with the fragile ecosystem of the pass and the valleys and hills in the area," he said.

"In addition, clouds of dust are blown over the pass each day by the speeding vehicles that drive up and down the hairpin bends," he added.

Environmentalists have asked for allowing only vehicles with Euro II emission limits to be allowed to drive upto the pass so that the beauty of the pass can be maintained.

They say the snow is turning black with the soot from vehicles. Some say the exhaust is so polluting that even the rocks along the roadsides leading up to the pass are turning black or dark grey.

Four years ago, the Rohtang Pass was in the news when environmentalists and the apex court rapped some leading multinational companies for painting advertisements on rocks along the roads.

The court had ordered them to scrub clean the rocks damaged by chemical paints.