Keeping Ladakh Ladakhi

Julley.

In August 2025 I cycled across Ladakh. Five days. To Umling La — the highest motorable road in the world.

I was turning sixty. A landmark birthday in anyone’s life. The age at which most people are advised, sensibly, to slow down. To rest. To go on an exotic vacation. To do something considered normal.

Instead, I came here. To Ladakh. A genuinely exotic location.

Because I am so much in love with this place and its people. And there was nowhere else I wanted to be on that day.

I have ridden this land before. Leh to Pangong in 2009. Manali to Leh in 2013 and 2014. This time, something was different.

Not in the mountains. The mountains are unchanged. What was different was what we — all of us, the visitors, the businesses, the planners, the people who say they love this place — have begun building between them.

I want to talk about that.

I want to talk about it gently, because Ladakhis have heard enough lectures from outsiders about what they should and should not do with their own land. And I want to talk about it honestly, because the people of Ladakh are themselves asking these questions, and they deserve our company in asking them, not our advice.

The question this gathering has set itself is a large one — how to balance economic development and nature conservation in Ladakh, in the backdrop of Viksit Bharat 2047. I want to come at it through one narrow doorway. Tourism. Because tourism is where that balance is tested in Ladakh every single day — in every new hotel, every widened road, every litre of water drawn from a shrinking glacier.

Here is the question I want us to sit with.

Ladakh is being loved to death. By people who came because it was different. By people who are now asking it to be the same.

Let me start with arithmetic, not adjectives.

Ladakh has a permanent population of roughly three lakh. In recent years, the number of visitors arriving in a single year has crossed several times that figure. And they no longer come only in summer. They come for the passes in May. For Pangong in July. For the snow leopard in February. For the frozen Chadar in the depth of winter.

There is no off-season any more. The land is never allowed to rest.

The Indus and the Zanskar run through this country. The Indus comes down from Tibet, crossing Ladakh on its long journey to the sea. The Zanskar gathers itself within Ladakh’s own mountains and joins the Indus at Nimmu. But Leh town does not drink from either. The town sits on a terrace above the Indus. What comes out of a tap in a Leh hotel is not river water. It is water from small streams flowing down from the mountains above the town — fed by snow, by glacier, by springs that are drying earlier each year. It is water from bore wells driven deeper every season.

That is the water budget of a cold desert. The same water budget that, in every season now, supports more visitors than residents.

And yet — new hotels advertise heated swimming pools at eleven thousand feet. Properties promise twenty-four-hour hot water. I have seen bathtubs in places where every litre is borrowed from a melting glacier. Drinking water on most menus is bottled, trucked up from the plains in plastic. We are driving water up a mountain so that other water, just as good, can sit in a glass with a label on it.

Why?

Why does a traveller fly to one of the most extraordinary landscapes on Earth and then ask for the bathroom they have at home?

The honest answer is — we have confused travel with comfort. The tourism industry, not just here, everywhere, has learned the easy lesson. That the surest way to make money is to give the customer something familiar in an unfamiliar setting. A standard room. A buffet breakfast. A smooth road to the famous viewpoint. A hot shower at the end of it.

It works as a business model. It does not work as Ladakh.

Here is what I think we are missing.

In most of the world, tourism happens on top of a place. You go for a beach, but the beach is not the experience — the resort is. You go for a city, but the city is the setting — the restaurants, the hotels, the comforts are the experience.

In Ladakh, it is the other way around.

The landscape is not the backdrop. The landscape is the offering. The thin air. The cold nights. The long silences. The slow road. The simple food. These are not inconveniences to be managed. These are what you came for. The ruggedness is not a problem the hotel has to solve. The ruggedness is the product.

When we smooth Ladakh, we are not making it better for the traveller. We are subtracting the very reason the traveller came.

And the same is true of the culture. Perhaps more so.

People come here because the village still functions as a village. Because the monastery on the hill is not a museum but a working monastery, where monks still chant the dawn prayers as they have done for generations. Because the conversation in a homestay is with the family that lives there, not with a hospitality executive trained to smile. Because the older man you meet on the road might be the one who knows the story of that mountain, and might, if you sit quietly with him, share it with you.

Replace the homestay with a chain hotel. Replace the family with uniformed staff. Replace the village kitchen with a continental menu. Replace the slow tea with Wi-Fi.

What remains?

A landscape, viewed through glass.

Now — I want to be careful here. Because it is very easy for a visitor like me to romanticise what we want Ladakhis to keep doing.

We praise the homestay. We forget that the family is working hard inside it.

We praise the slow road. We forget that someone has to drive an ambulance over it when a child is ill.

We praise the simple life. We are not the ones living it through January.

The people of Ladakh have every right to electricity, to good roads, to schools, to hospitals, to incomes that match the rest of India. Nobody — least of all someone like me, who flies in for a week — has the right to ask a village to stay picturesque for our cameras.

So this is not an argument for keeping Ladakh poor. It is an argument for keeping Ladakh Ladakhi. Those are two different things, and the people of Ladakh know the difference far better than we do.

And this is where I want to say a word about Viksit Bharat 2047. A developed India, by its hundredth year of freedom, must of course include a developed Ladakh — with the roads, the schools, the hospitals, the livelihoods that every Indian deserves. Nobody here would argue otherwise. But development and disfigurement are not the same word. A confident, developed nation is precisely the one that does not need to make all its places look alike. The measure of Viksit Bharat in Ladakh will not be how many hotels we built, or how many swimming pools we filled. It will be whether, in 2047, Ladakh is still recognisably Ladakh — still itself, still worth the journey. Development that erases the place it develops has not succeeded. It has only changed the shape of the loss.

They have been telling us. In their assemblies, in their hunger strikes, in their demands for constitutional protection, in their patient statements about glaciers and grazing rights — they have been saying that they want the modern world on their own terms. Not on the terms of a hotel chain. Not on the terms of a planner sitting somewhere else who sees Ladakh as a backdrop for someone else’s holiday.

We owe them the courtesy of listening.

There is a quieter question worth asking, then. Why come at all?

I do not ask it in a hostile way. I ask it as an honest one.

If what you want is a swimming pool and a buffet, those exist in Goa, in Phuket, in Dubai — easier to reach, cheaper to enjoy, less ecologically costly to operate. You do not need Ladakh for them.

If what you want is what only Ladakh has — the altitude, the strangeness, the slowness, the gompas, the families who have made a life on this high plateau for a thousand years, the way the late-afternoon light falls on the river — then come. Come for those things. Not for the imported comforts someone has installed to make you feel less far from home.

If you fly to Leh and spend a week in a sealed hotel ordering room service, you did not come to Ladakh. You came to a hotel that happens to be in Ladakh. Those are different things.

If you drive the Manali–Leh highway with the windows up, in an SUV, listening to your own playlist, stopping only for selfies at the high passes — you did not see the road. You crossed it.

I am not standing apart from this. Let me be clear about that.

I cycle here. I stay in lodges. I have, more than once, drunk from a plastic bottle when I should not have. I take photographs for audiences who will scroll past them in three seconds.

I am part of the half-million.

So this is not a sermon. I am one of the people I am describing.

But the traveller who walks a stretch instead of driving it — who sips butter tea in a roadside kitchen — who sleeps in a homestay and remembers the names of the family — who carries his own bottle and refills it where the spring still runs clean — that traveller is not denying themselves anything.

That traveller is being given Ladakh.

The other version is being sold a brochure.

Here is the paradox I want to leave you with.

I came to Ladakh because it was not like anywhere else. And every time I return, I see more of the things that make everywhere else look the same.

A swimming pool. A signboard in a familiar font. A lobby that could be in Dubai. A road newly tarred and widened past where the road should end. A bottled-water truck overtaking a yak.

Each addition was made, presumably, to give the visitor what they wanted. Each addition takes away a little of why the visitor came.

If you want a film set, build one. Build it in Mumbai, in Hyderabad, on a soundstage where nothing real has to be moved aside. Do not build it in a place that took ten thousand years of geology and a thousand years of human patience to become what it is.

If we want Ladakh to remain Ladakh, the answer is not less tourism. It is a different kind of travel — and a different kind of building. Travel that arrives prepared for the place, instead of expecting the place to prepare for the traveller. Building that adds nothing the land cannot carry. And decisions, finally, taken by the people who live here — for the lives they themselves want to lead.

Otherwise we will succeed, in time, in making Ladakh comfortable.

And on the day we succeed, there will no longer be any reason to come.

The thing I cherished, I am turning into what will not be cherished.

Not soon.

Already.

Julley. Thank you.

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