Ladakh is witnessing a tourism boom, with more than 1,200 hotels in Leh catering to tourists this summer. However, with groundwater levels getting depleted, and with hundreds of new hotels coming up, fears are rising that Leh may soon be without water and will have to regulate tourist traffic.
“Very soon the government will have to intervene and do something about these hotels, as they are using up the groundwater to cater to tourists. If there is no immediate intervention, the hotels and Leh’s residents will have to rely on bottled water for daily use,” Tundup Angmo told this reporter over telephone. Angmo has been working on water shortage in Ladakh and her study, “Impacts of Climate Change” has caused much alarm among environmentalists. Angmo said that the vanishing glaciers and depleting groundwater levels are responsible for the acute drinking water shortage in Leh. She said that because of less snow and low rainfall, groundwater is not getting replenished and many natural springs have dried up. Ladakh gets 95% of its water from the melting glaciers in summer, but glaciers such as Khardungla have melted completely and dozens of small glaciers have vanished. Leh is already witnessing a scarcity of drinking water. “We are buying drinking water for daily use from Leh’s growing water market,” Ahsan Ali, a tourist taxi operator in Kargil told this newspaper. The sinking of new tube-wells to tap into the groundwater is posing another challenge.
The streams around Leh are polluted and cannot be used to get drinking water. Yangchan Dolma, a lady known to work for the environment, told this newspaper, “The traditional Ladakhi dry compost toilets should be revived, as the modern flush toilets are draining whatever little water resources are left in Leh.” Dolma says that the accumulation of garbage is also posing a problem for the villages in Leh’s neighbourhood.
When asked, Sonam Dava, the CEO of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC) said, “We are aware of the problems including the drinking water shortage. We have to divert the tourist rush to unexplored places in Ladakh to save Leh and Pangong Lake.”