The summer is lost. Barring a few lucky ones working with the floriculture department not many of us took selfies with the tulips or as they say tiptoed through the tulips. The gushing rivers did not have many admirers. Nor did the sublime meadows and meticulously laid out Mughal Gardens. As the summer wears on and the prospect of things getting normal looks very dim we ask what are the possibilities for tourism in the months of say September, October and early November-We are practically talking about Autumn season. We are talking about autumn tourism.
Profit set aside, but for the liabilities and to keep the billing going we need to keep some kind of pre-winter tourism going on. The money generated through tourism reaches everyone from a travel agent, transporter, a guide, an artist, a vendor, a horseman or a hotel waiter. We can assume that there would be minimum tourism even if the things get normal by September. Here is when local tourism can be beneficial to sustain the tourism sector. Autumn, as a philosopher says, is a spring where every leaf is a flower.
Autumn is mainly a season of local tourism in the northern hemisphere as it is a harvest season. So even the peasant class can, out of joy, say afford a trip or two to a different district. We need to organise a few fairs of cultural importance to woo the mildly reluctant local tourist to shed inertia and take family on a one day trip. We need to install stalls and kiosks to highlight our socio-economic diversity.
The government needs to seriously devise ways to sustain tourism and low cost village fairs at virgin places can bring dual benefits-one is tourism would be somewhat elementarily sustained and at the same time people will know more about their culture and relate to it. We can rope in all singers and performers of repute at these fairs and keep low cost items of cultural importance at the stalls.
Autumn tourism or village fair tourism is never a failure as it entails low cost tourism. However, it is emblematic of our culture and binds us to our society. To sustain tourism in the valley before the onset of winter autumn tourism is the way. Let us start planning for it from today.
