Promoting Slow Tourism in Uttarakhand: A Community-Led Approach
In an interview with FinancialExpress.com, Lokesh Ohri, who has founded Humanities Himalaya and a walking group called Been There, Doon That, said, “We are trying to promote slow tourism, especially in Uttarakhand. We are reaching out to communities, training them, preparing them to lead walking trails, to run homestays, to curate experiences for visitors. And then we are bringing in responsible visitors to these communities.”
Been There, Doon That is a growing community of about 100,000 walkers, people who want to experience slow tourism, who want to walk through villages, understand nature, and understand heritage. “We just completed 600 walks and, to my mind, that’s a huge milestone. We’ve been at it for 11 years and, in the process, we’ve been able to connect with at least 13 village communities in Uttarakhand, in Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh and we have empowered them to run their own entrepreneurship in terms of slow travel,” said Mr Ohri.
Empowering Communities Through Sustainable Tourism: Insights from the Adventure Tourism Meet 2025
He was appreciative of the efforts of the Indian Express Group in organising the Adventure Tourism Meet 2025 in Dehradun. “The Adventure Tourism Meet was a great experience. It was wonderful to be here and to learn from individuals and groups who are also working in the same domain,” he said, “I think the most significant takeaway has been that now Uttarakhand needs to slow down its travel and a lot of the other people that I’ve met also underline this fact that Uttarakhand has enough infrastructure and now what we need to do is empower the communities to make use of this infrastructure and become entrepreneurs in their approach.”
“Uttarakhand is ecologically very sensitive. So one thing [to keep in mind] is safety. A lot of the times we are compromising on the safety like even with rafting, we see this a lot. And the second thing that we need to look at is the carrying capacity—how much can a destination take and we need to prevent overcrowding. We need to be very mindful of the safety standards that we adopt,” he said.
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