Popular hill stations across Himachal Pradesh may soon face ceilings on visitor numbers and commercial lodging if recommendations submitted to the Supreme Court are put into action.
The Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee (CEC) has recommended that the state government assess the scientific carrying capacity of major holiday destinations and place temporary restrictions on both tourist inflows and commercial construction in areas facing severe environmental strain.
The recommendations were submitted before a bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta, and Aparesh Kumar Singh, which granted the Himachal Pradesh government time to file its formal response. The proceedings follow suo motu cognisance taken by the apex court in July 2025 regarding ecological degradation, hill destabilisation, and frequent landslides in the state.
In its report, the CEC stated that the rapid increase in hotels, homestays, and tourist arrivals is occurring without published or legally binding carrying-capacity ceilings, in contravention of the state’s Tourism Policy of 2019. The committee recommended assessing municipal and environmental parameters—including road bandwidth, parking availability, solid-waste management, and ecological sensitivity—to determine sustainable thresholds for individual hubs.
The panel also sought an immediate review of commercial and resort construction along the highway stretch linking Shimla and Kasauli, citing extensive hill cutting and slope modification. Additionally, it recommended withdrawing all active tenders for selecting private ecotourism operators on forest land and staying existing concession agreements pending an examination by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
Beyond tourism, the report flagged severe engineering and compliance failures in highway expansion. The panel observed that near-vertical slope cuts have caused recurrent highway damage, noting that the National Highways Authority of India recently cleared ₹825 crore for slope stabilisation across 44 vulnerable stretches along the Kiratpur-Manali highway alone.
The CEC further recommended that the Union Environment Ministry re-evaluate environmental clearance exemptions for certain hill-highway widenings, criticising the submission of piecemeal forest-diversion proposals for linear road projects. The committee also documented an approximate 10% backlog in mandatory compensatory afforestation for forest land diverted across Himachal Pradesh since 1980–81.
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