By Hrishikesh Raychaudhuri
There is an uncomfortable question at the heart of every debate on tourism: who is entitled to travel? Is a tourist welcome merely because he arrives in a comfortable SUV, stays in an expensive resort, eats at high-end restaurants and leaves behind a sizable bill? Or is the modest family that arrives by road, carries homemade food, counts its expenses carefully and returns home by evening somehow less entitled to experience the mountains, waterfalls and forests of another part of India? This question becomes particularly pertinent in the context of Patricia Mukhim’s much-discussed column, “Maggie Noodles Tourism Killing Meghalaya”. The article raises an undeniably serious issue: Meghalaya’s fragile tourism infrastructure is struggling with crowding, waste, traffic and the environmental consequences of unregulated visitation. Her concerns about carrying capacity, inadequate facilities and the failure to add value to tourist destinations deserve serious consideration. Yet there is a conceptual distinction that ought not to be lost in the polemic. A tourist can be irresponsible without being poor. A tourist can be affluent without being responsible. And a tourist can be economically modest without being “cheap”.
That distinction is central because the problem with the language of the “cheap tourist” is not merely semantic. It risks transforming an argument about conduct into an argument about class. Mukhim recounts encountering tourists who had carried utensils and cooking equipment and were preparing Maggi noodles by the roadside rather than purchasing food from nearby stalls. She interpreted this as evidence of visitors unwilling to contribute even modestly to the local economy. Her wider argument concerns congestion, waste, discourteous driving and the inability of the authorities to regulate tourist sites. These are legitimate concerns. But suppose a family from Guwahati earns a modest income. Suppose travelling to Shillong is one of the few holidays that families can afford. They drive rather than fly, bring food because restaurant prices may significantly increase the cost of the trip, stop at a scenic location, photograph the hills, visit a waterfall and return home. What exactly makes them cheap? They may be frugal. They may be budget-conscious. They may be economically constrained. But poverty is not a moral defect. Frugality is not incivility. Low expenditure is not synonymous with low citizenship. The anecdote may reveal a consumption pattern, but it does not establish a hierarchy of human worth.
India is a constitutional democracy, not a gated resort. Article 19(1)(d) of the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to move freely throughout the territory of India, subject to constitutionally permissible restrictions. That right does not give anyone an unlimited licence to litter, pollute, trespass, obstruct roads, damage ecosystems or disregard local laws. Such conduct can and should be regulated. But the existence of environmental regulation cannot be converted into a class filter. A citizen does not cease to possess dignity because he cannot afford a restaurant meal. A waterfall does not become more Indian because the person viewing it arrived in a luxury vehicle. A mountain does not become more sacred when approached by someone wearing expensive outdoor clothing. A destination cannot become the preserve of the affluent merely because its popularity has created inconvenience for some sections of its residents.
The most important distinction in this debate is therefore between tourist expenditure and tourist behaviour. They are not the same variable. A visitor who spends ₹10,000 in Meghalaya can still litter. A visitor who spends ₹500 can dispose of every piece of waste responsibly. An affluent traveller can be environmentally profligate; a budget traveller can be environmentally conscientious. A luxury hotel guest may arrive by air, consume substantial quantities of water and energy and produce considerable waste. A group of young travellers may travel by shared vehicle, carry reusable bottles and spend modestly. Which is the more desirable tourist? The answer cannot be determined merely by the size of the bill. The proper categories are not rich versus poor, or expensive versus cheap, but responsible versus irresponsible, regulated versus unregulated, sustainable versus unsustainable. The object of regulation should be conduct, not class. Littering should attract a penalty irrespective of the offender’s income. Illegal parking should attract a fine irrespective of the registration plate. Damage to a cave should attract sanctions irrespective of whether the visitor came from Assam, Delhi, Mumbai or Shillong. Excessive footfall should be controlled irrespective of whether the visitors arrive in luxury cars or ordinary vans. That is the language of public policy. Calling people “cheap” is the language of social judgement.
There is also an economic irony in treating mass visitors primarily as an inconvenience. Meghalaya does not merely receive tourists; it depends upon them. Official and media reports have documented a substantial rise in tourist traffic over the past decade, with annual visitor numbers increasing from roughly 6.9 lakh in 2013 to about 12.7 lakh by 2023. Assam accounted for a significant 43 per cent of domestic tourists, making it the largest source market. Tourism has become a meaningful part of Meghalaya’s economic landscape, with research estimating its contribution at around seven per cent of state GDP. These figures are consequential because they reveal an uncomfortable truth: the very people who may be dismissed as low-spending outsiders are also among the principal customers sustaining the state’s tourism economy.
The interdependence between Assam and Meghalaya is particularly important. Geography has made them natural partners. A resident of Guwahati can reach Shillong relatively easily, and for many families in the Northeast, Meghalaya is one of the most accessible hill destinations. To regard accessibility itself as a defect is economically myopic. The ordinary tourist is not merely a consumer. He is the customer of a taxi driver, the customer of a homestay, the customer of a roadside shop, the customer of a guide, the customer of a petrol station, the customer of a small restaurant and the customer of a local handicraft seller. His expenditure may be individually modest, but aggregated across thousands of visitors it sustains an extensive informal and semi-formal economy. Ten thousand ordinary tourists spending moderately can sustain an ecosystem of small entrepreneurs just as surely as a few wealthy visitors can enrich luxury resorts.
This is why tourism cannot be reduced to hotel receipts or premium consumption. It includes the tea stall, the shared taxi, the village homestay, the guide, the photographer, the fruit seller, the handicraft maker and the young person earning a seasonal income in an area where conventional industrial opportunities may be limited. Studies on Meghalaya have noted precisely this potential: tourism can generate livelihoods in remote and economically marginalised communities and can create opportunities where other industries are scarce. In some community-led models, tourism has also strengthened local participation, cultural preservation and women’s economic agency. Meghalaya’s challenge, therefore, is to ensure that tourism generates equitable local value rather than to assume that visitors who spend less are inherently undesirable.
The Maggi anecdote deserves another interpretation. A group of tourists carrying food from home may be read as evidence of stinginess. Yet there is another possible interpretation: it may represent the democratisation of travel. For decades, leisure tourism in India was substantially associated with the upper and upper-middle classes. The growth of road connectivity, private vehicles, budget accommodation and disposable income has gradually transformed travel into a mass phenomenon. People who could once only dream of visiting the hills can now actually visit them. The family outing has become a form of aspiration. The road trip has become a form of access. The modest tourist is therefore not simply a consumer category; he is also evidence that the pleasures of geography are no longer monopolised by geography’s wealthy inhabitants.
To resent this democratisation is to mistake the aesthetic inconvenience of mass society for a moral failure of the masses. A country of more than a billion people cannot realistically pursue a tourism philosophy in which only those capable of high discretionary expenditure are considered worthy travellers. The whole idea of public access to natural and cultural spaces would become distorted if tourism were silently transformed into a luxury commodity. Nature conservation is unquestionably necessary; economic exclusion is not a synonym for conservation.
This brings us to the fashionable proposition of “high-value, low-volume tourism”. Bhutan is often cited as an example of deliberately regulating tourism through fees and controls designed to reduce environmental pressure while increasing economic value per visitor. There is much to learn from such models, but there is also a danger in importing the philosophy without nuance. Wealth itself does not produce environmental virtue. The affluent can be wasteful, careless and extractive; the budget traveller can be disciplined, frugal and environmentally conscious. If Meghalaya wishes to regulate tourism, it should do so on the basis of carrying capacity, ecological footprint, duration of stay, waste generation, resource consumption and local economic benefit. The relevant question is not whether the tourist can afford a luxury resort. The relevant question is whether the tourism model is sustainable. There is a world of difference between pricing environmental externalities and pricing human worth.
The deeper problem, therefore, may be one of governance. Mukhim’s strongest criticism is arguably not her complaint about tourists but her criticism of the authorities. She points to overcrowding at destinations such as Arwah Cave and Kynrem Falls and asks why carrying capacity is not being enforced, why entry fees are not being rationalised and why tourism assets are not being managed more professionally. Here the argument becomes considerably stronger. If a cave has a scientifically determined visitor capacity, regulate entry. If a waterfall requires parking management, create designated parking. If visitors are littering, establish collection systems and enforce fines. If roadside cooking creates fire or sanitation problems, designate picnic zones or restrict cooking in environmentally sensitive locations. If businesses are losing revenue, create well-managed vending areas and improve the quality of local services. If vehicles are causing congestion, enforce traffic regulations rather than making generalised assumptions about everyone travelling in vehicles from one state.
This is what effective public policy looks like. Infrastructure, incentives and enforcement are the instruments of governance. Civic virtue is desirable, but no mature administration can base an entire tourism system on the assumption that every visitor will spontaneously behave well. Visitors respond to institutional design. When there are no bins, waste accumulates. When there is no parking system, vehicles stop wherever space is available. When there are no toilets, people improvise. When there are no capacity controls, fragile sites become overcrowded. Governance cannot permanently outsource its responsibilities to the moral character of strangers.
Meghalaya certainly has a genuine environmental problem. Fragile caves, waterfalls, forests, roads and rural settlements cannot absorb unlimited footfall. The Union Tourism Ministry has also stressed that tourism in the ecologically sensitive Northeast must remain mindful of carrying capacity. But carrying capacity is a scientific concept; “cheap tourist” is a social category. Carrying capacity asks how much pressure an ecosystem can withstand. The adjective “cheap” asks, implicitly, how much money a visitor is willing to spend. One is an environmental and administrative framework; the other risks becoming class prejudice masquerading as ecological concern. Meghalaya needs carrying-capacity tourism, not class-capacity tourism.
That means determining how many vehicles a road can safely accommodate, how many people a cave can absorb, how much wastewater a settlement can process and how much waste a destination can collect. It means using data rather than anecdotes. It means measuring visitor flows rather than assigning collective guilt. It means differentiating between a person who comes to enjoy a place responsibly on a budget and a person who deliberately violates environmental norms. The former is a tourist; the latter is an environmental violator. The two categories should never be conflated.
There is also a deeper question of constitutional morality. Meghalaya is not a tourist theme park inhabited by residents who possess a proprietary right to decide which Indians are sufficiently respectable to enter. Shillong is a city in India. Sohra is in India. Umiam is in India. The waterfalls, forests and caves of Meghalaya may be subject to local custodianship, legal protections and ecological restrictions, but the people visiting them remain fellow citizens. India’s federal structure does not create separate moral hierarchies of citizenship. Regulation is legitimate; exclusion on the basis of income is not. A rich tourist cannot purchase immunity from environmental rules, and a poor tourist cannot be denied dignity because he brought lunch from home.
This distinction becomes even more significant when one considers the Northeast’s long history of being stereotyped by outsiders. The region has often complained, with considerable justification, about being exoticised, misunderstood or treated as culturally peripheral. Such experiences should make the public discourse of the Northeast especially careful about reproducing broad stereotypes of its own. The “outsider” is an easy category. Today the target may be the Assamese tourist; tomorrow it may be the Bengali tourist, the Delhi tourist or the visitor from another part of India. Once tourism becomes a contest over cultural purity, the destination risks losing the cosmopolitan generosity that helped make it attractive in the first place.
One must also recognise the distinction between a state’s local identity and national belonging. Meghalaya can remain distinctly Meghalaya without becoming socially exclusionary. Khasi, Jaintia and Garo cultural traditions do not require the exclusion of ordinary Indian travellers. Indeed, the strength of cultural tourism lies precisely in dialogue: the visitor comes to understand the landscape, history, customs and communities of the region, while the community derives income and recognition from its own heritage. Tourism at its best is not an invasion; it is an exchange. At its worst, certainly, it is extractive, disruptive and destructive. But the remedy for destructive tourism is not disdain for the tourist. It is the redesign of the tourism system.
There is an unavoidable paradox in successful tourism. A place becomes a destination because people desire to see it. Then, precisely because people come to see it, the destination becomes crowded. Residents become irritated by the congestion. The tourists are then blamed for being tourists. This is the classic contradiction of overtourism. Yet the intelligent response cannot be “come here, but preferably only if you are wealthy enough to be worth the inconvenience”. The more defensible response is: come, but under a system that protects both the destination and your right to experience it responsibly.
That means dispersing tourism beyond the familiar destinations of Shillong and Sohra. It means developing secondary circuits, encouraging village tourism, strengthening homestays, training local guides, improving sanitation, introducing parking management, digitising permits at fragile sites, monitoring visitor numbers, penalising littering and creating designated picnic areas. It could mean conservation fees, carrying-capacity limits and timed entry. It could mean encouraging visitors to buy local products and services while simultaneously ensuring that local businesses provide competitive prices and quality. It could mean coordination between Assam and Meghalaya rather than allowing geography to harden into antagonism.
Perhaps the most important transformation required is linguistics. The vocabulary through which a society describes tourists shapes the policies it eventually adopts. Call them “cheap tourists” and the imagination moves towards exclusion. Call them “high-value tourists” and one risks reducing the worth of a traveller to his purchasing power. Call them “irresponsible tourists” and the debate begins to move towards conduct, accountability and regulation. That final vocabulary is the most productive. The desired transition should not be from poor tourist to rich tourist; it should be from irresponsible tourist to responsible tourist.
Let a student travel to Meghalaya on a small budget. Let a middle-class family carry homemade food. Let a couple stay in a modest homestay. Let a wealthy traveller book a luxury resort. Let everyone obey the same environmental laws. Let everyone pay the applicable conservation fee. Let everyone respect local communities. Let everyone carry back what they bring in. Let everyone understand that Meghalaya is not merely scenery but a living ecosystem. That is not the death of tourism. It is the foundation of sustainable tourism.
Patricia Mukhim’s concerns therefore deserve neither dismissal nor unquestioning acceptance. She is correct to warn that tourism can destroy the ecological inheritance upon which tourism itself depends. She is correct that uncontrolled crowding, reckless driving, littering, deficient sanitation and poor visitor management threaten destinations. She is correct that Meghalaya must learn to extract greater local value from its natural and cultural assets. But these valid concerns become conceptually weaker when economic modesty, picnic culture or lower expenditure are allowed to become proxies for moral deficiency.
Not every visitor who enters Meghalaya is cheap. Not every Assamese tourist is discourteous. Not every person who cooks Maggi noodles is indifferent to Meghalaya’s environment. Not everyone who travels on a modest budget is parasitic upon the local economy. And, most importantly, economic weakness cannot be transformed into a disqualification from experiencing the beauty of one’s own country. A citizen who cannot afford an expensive holiday still possesses the same constitutional dignity as the affluent traveller.
The mountain does not ask who paid for the car. The waterfall does not inspect the tourist’s income. The cloud does not distinguish between a luxury traveller and a family carrying lunch. Nature may have a carrying capacity, but democratic citizenship should not be assigned a price tag.
The question Meghalaya ought therefore to ask is not, “How do we get rid of cheap tourists?” It is, “How do we make every tourist rich or poor, local or outsider, first-time visitor or frequent traveller a responsible custodian of the place he has come to admire?” That is the more constitutional question. It is the more egalitarian question. It is the more economically intelligent question. And, ultimately, it is the more civilised one.
