Is Tourism Taking a Toll Despite the Best Travel Practices?

I think, there are policies and laws in place but there’s very little implementation of it. Definitely, I feel these policies and laws could be enhanced. For instance, in places like Himachal, they have a common policy for homestays. It has to have a room with a common toilet with hot and cold water. But in a place like Spiti, that’s not contextual. If you’re going for a homestay, you’re staying in a local person’s house, they don’t have common toilets themselves. So, to expect them to provide an attached toilet which has running water? In the houses, they don’t have running water
Traditionally in Spiti, they had dry composting toilets. You’re forcing them to convert to flush toilets when there’s not enough water for agriculture here. So definitely, policies like these definitely need to be looked at contextually. They need to be developed more contextually.  Of course, there are signboards that you see all over the place but how many travellers really look at those signboards that are telling you to travel in a certain way? ‘Don’t’ throw your garbage. I mean, there need to be amenities that we provide, right? O.K. Yes. At one level, you do need to raise awareness, at another level you need to have facilities which are well maintained and that travellers can use regularly. Be it for dumping garbage, be it public utilities like toilets. Water refill points, you know? Places like Himachal should have these all over. Or even in the hills, it should be everywhere that it’s a norm that one refills a bottle as opposed to buying one. The thing is that for a traveller if they are given a choice, and with a lot of drilling into their heads, they would finally start using these facilities. But, these facilities aren’t there and they aren’t well maintained.