The first time Mitali Kakkar visited Lakshadweep, she boarded the Tipu Sultan, a ship out of Kochi, and spent nearly a full day sailing east. After pulling into a couple of the bigger islands, the vessel anchored off Kadmat, and a little boat, the Omana Poo, came to collect her family and take them ashore. The year was 1993, and although Rajiv Gandhi had famously spent a holiday in Lakshadweep a few years earlier, the islands still received only a trickle of visitors. “It was unexplored, totally pristine,” Kakkar said. “I couldn’t believe this was a part of India.”
The next year, on Kadmat, Kakkar and her husband, Prahlad, the ad filmmaker, set up a dive centre called Laccadives, in partnership with the government. For the next 16 years, the Kakkars escaped to Lakshadweep every chance they got. When they weren’t diving, they were snorkelling. Very often, she says, they felt like they were the first humans to set eyes on sections of the marvellous coral reefs that lay just below the water. They watched the ocean’s many citizens go past: battalions of tuna, reef sharks, eels, turtles, rays, both manta and sting. At its southern tip, Kadmat is mere metres wide, so Kakkar could, from the same spot, watch the sun climb out of the sea in the morning and douse itself again at night. The beaches were theirs and theirs alone—gentle curves of glowing sand that melted into the water. Bliss.
Kakkar’s story is about her discovery of paradise and also about her expulsion from it. In 2010, the Lakshadweep government began to make it difficult for private enterprises to flourish in the islands’ tourism sector. Laccadives’ licence was not renewed, Kakkar said, with no explanation given. Another company, Kerala’s CGH Earth, had its agreement to run a government-owned resort on Bangaram island abruptly terminated, resulting in prolonged litigation. A government agency—oddly named SPORTS, Society for Promotion of Nature, Tourism and Sports, assumed a monopoly on the entire tourist trade. Indians still require permits to visit the Lakshadweep Islands, and they must book their trips to the islands solely through SPORTS.
The frustrations surrounding the tourism industry in Lakshadweep are really the dilemmas of all tourism. How do we find a fine balance between satisfying visitors and maintaining the purity of a destination? How many tourists is too many? Who should determine the shape and form of the tourism industry in an isolated corner of the world? And given how warming waters are already bleaching the reefs around Lakshadweep, what should take precedence in the coming years: protecting the coral from further harm, or enabling tourists to holiday in the limpid waters of these nubbin-like atolls? Is there, perhaps, a way to do both? These are all questions that don’t have easy answers.
Tourism in the Lakshadweep Islands has always been coral-like: small, fragile, vulnerable. When CGH Earth won its contract for the Bangaram Island Resort, way back in 1988, there were no tourists to speak of. “The ship ran once every 15 days, and for a while, there were no flights into Lakshadweep at all,” Jose Dominic, the managing director of CGH Earth, said. “We even chartered a five-seater plane to fly visitors from Cochin to Agatti airport.” When airlines such as Vayudoot and NEPC began regular runs from the mainland, CGH Earth would sometimes buy seats on them to fly in provisions. “One person weighs around 70kg, so for the price of an air ticket, we’d fly in 70kg of tomatoes and pineapples.”
Boldly, CGH Earth priced its rooms high: around US$180, which in this day and age is about Rs12,000, equal to what you would expect to pay for a night’s stay at a five-star in a metro. It aimed for the cream of international tourists, and it was determined to offer few frills that come with such a price tag. “There were no phones or television or air conditioning. Also, no multicuisine restaurant or swimming pool,” Dominic said. “The idea was to offer the experience of nature without spoiling it with ostentatious embellishments. To learn from the ways of the island people, as you dived, swam or did nothing.” In the evenings, visitors desiring company ambled to the juice shop or the tea shop in the nearest village; those desiring solitude sought out the lighthouse. Time flowed gently, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.
This low-impact model of tourism was calibrated not just to the local ecology but also to human life upon the islands. Nearly every islander is Muslim, and social relations are still conservative. There are few avenues of employment, apart from working for the government or fishing, and these seem to suffice for the local population. Also, India guards this outpost fiercely. No mainlander may buy land, and the shipments of food and fuel that wend their way to the islands are heavily subsidised. Air India is the only airline that connects Agatti airport to the mainland (AI operates a daily flight, Monday through Saturday).
“From a conservation point of view, the pressure of tourism isn’t yet visible on the reef,” said Shreya Yadav, a marine biologist who has researched Lakshadweep’s reefs with Nature Conservation Foundation. Yadav has spent months on end probing for signs of bleaching, and swimming among schools of silvery skipjack tuna, orange-and-white butterfly fish, and thuggish-looking barracuda. “In other island destinations, you see broken coral and the impact of pollution, but not so much in Lakshadweep. And that’s because tourism is so heavily regulated. In that sense, the regulation is a blessing.” Outside the water, there is little to do but laze. “There’s no great impetus to move out, because it’s a tougher life on the mainland. Here, they have their own football clubs; there’s a strong sense of community.”
In such societies, it’s easy for tourists to feel like outsiders crashing a family reunion. A frequent visitor to the islands, who runs a dive centre elsewhere, stopped going a few years ago. Choosing to remain anonymous, he reveals that his experience of staying on the islands was as poor as his dives under them were magnificent. “You pay some Rs6,000 for a room—I hear it’s Rs12,000 now—and you get nothing to show for it,” he said. “The government maintains the resorts badly.” In the 1990s, the first decade he went there, “they didn’t even have a toaster for breakfast. The staff would make us dinner at 4pm and go home, so when we served ourselves at night, we’d be eating cold, congealed fried fish.”
Tariq Thomas, an IAS officer who began his tenure as the managing director of SPORTS in May 2016, said that the government recognises the need to revitalise tourism. “One of the impediments for tourism development in Lakshadweep was the absence of a policy, which has now been addressed.”
Thomas revealed that a new, coherent tourism policy for the islands has been notified and that the government is formulating guidelines specific to individual spheres of tourist activity—hotels, dive centres, water sports—keeping in mind the sensitive ecology and the islands’ inability to handle large volumes of tourists. The government is also relaunching the resort on Bangaram under the aegis of SPORTS.
This plays a role in the larger scheme of things. The government’s primary think tank, the NITI Aayog (the CEO of which, Amitabh Kant, is a former Tourism Secretary and the force behind the Incredible !ndia campaign) is preparing a blueprint to open as many as 20 islands to tourism. These include Smith and Ross in the Andamans, Mamlia in Kutch, Jambudweep off the coast of West Bengal, and five islands in Lakshadweep. In addition to this, the new National Civil Aviation Policy requires Indian airlines to fly to low-traffic destinations in the North East and to islands such as Lakshadweep, easing access to such destinations.
Thomas denied that the government wanted a monopoly on tourism in Lakshadweep. “We do think private entrepreneurs should be involved in the sector as well,” he insisted. “We want more high-end, low-volume tourism. We want our tourism tag line to be ‘The Coral Paradise of India’. Also, the government believes the islanders themselves should be the main stakeholders in any development here. “Given the fact that there are ecological factors, systems have to be in place to ensure proper waste and sewage disposal by tourism operators so that there is no destruction of the ecosystem,” Thomas added.
Lakshadweep’s residents are ambivalent about the prospective surge in tourism that a new policy might bring with it. MI Taha, who was born on Kadmat island and is a dive instructor with SPORTS on Kavaratti, knows what a boon private operators could be. “So many islanders will get jobs, whereas now most of us need to depend on the government, and that makes it very competitive,” he said. But the population also exerts a significant pressure on its politicians to keep the islands relatively untouched. In Lakshadweep, C Rahamathullah, a newly minted chemistry graduate, said, “We look at what happened to the Andamans as a warning sign. Most of us don’t want that kind of exposure.” It’s as if the people of Lakshadweep, severed from the world by an accident of geography, have come to treasure their isolation. “We want to maintain our culture, and not have it influenced too much by outsiders,” Rahamathullah said. “Partly, that’s a religious thing.”
It’s certainly possible to respect this sentiment and simultaneously nourish tourism, Kakkar said, citing Egypt’s model of sustainable tourism for the Red Sea region. “Marine sanctuaries and protected areas require special permission, and the number of boats and tourists entering is controlled,” she explained. Done right, such tourism can benefit both visitors and locals, without wrecking ecological havoc. If a similar model were to be created for the Lakshadweep islands, they could once again shimmer upon the horizon of Indian tourists.
Getting there: Air India flies daily from Kochi to Agatti. Alternatively, you can take a cruise ship from Kochi, which could take up to 18 hours. Indian nationals require a permit to visit the islands. Permits and bookings for stays at state-run hotels must be made through SPORTS and its authorised travel agents.
