The Hindu Business Line : Desert guide

The car park is where the competition begins. As soon as a group of tourists alights, half a dozen men swoop down like vultures. There are no menacing talons, just plastic cards that announce each of their owners to be Government-accredited guides. Yet like vultures, each one is hungry, hungry for business. There are more guides than tourists at the Patwa Haveli, a set of exquisite 19th-century sandstone buildings, in the heart of the old town, and a must on any tourist it inerary. “For Rs 50 only, I will show you around and explain everything,” pleads the first guide in a mix of Hindi and English. “I can do it for just Rs 20,” pitches another, a man in his 50s obviously fairly experienced in this chore. His is a floor bid, one that oozes desperation. It wins the tourist’s nod, of course, and he has business for the next hour. At least the man was not to have an entirely blank day.

Tourism in Jaisalmer town this season is not doing as well as last year, although no one can point to why. January is usually a peak tourist month in this town at the edge of the Great Thar Desert that draws about 2.7 lakh tourists a year, about one lakh of whom come from overseas: British, American, French , Spanish, Italian and Japanese.

Language is always the barrier for local guides: One can understand the problems of serving tour groups from continental Europe or Japan — they often bring their own guides from New Delhi — but providing decent commentary even in English is a difficult proposition for most.

Arun Purohit, 22 years old and already a fairly knowledgeable guide at the old fort, is a student of history in Hindi medium at the local college. “I started learning A,B,C in seventh class unlike kids today who do so right from first class,” he explains. “I can understand English when you speak; I can read but I cannot speak fluently.”

That is why Purohit and many of the few hundred other local guides cannot bid to serve the top dollar tourists and have to make do with the relatively spendthrift domestic visitors. “I will be happy to make about Rs 3,000 a month during the season,” he says. What about the off-season when desert winds drive temperatures up close to 50 degrees Celsius and keep tourists firmly out? “I will do nothing,” he says dryly.

If guides like him are to be believed, January is proving to be almost like off-season, which usually runs from March till September. And Jaisalmer town’s economy hangs virtually on tourism. A majority of the 58,000 population in this town are in the tourist trade, running hotels, restaurants — one claims to serve “authentic” Italian food — taxis and, most uniquely, camel rides across the sand dunes. But the thread it hangs on is thin for the locals and at times can even snap as it did after the 1998 nuclear tests at Pokharan, the even more sparsely populated village, just 110 km away. Few foreign tourists made bold to come during the season that followed, leaving a deep gash on the local economy.

Such stoic acceptance of a harsh reality is something one comes to expect of a people on whom nature serves but the very extremes. The district at 38,401 sq km is as large as Kerala but has just 13 people per sq km as against 819 in Kerala. Rainfall is scanty, the district average being about 16 cm a year as against Kerala’s 305 cm. Temperature on summer days can rise to a blistering 50 degrees Celsius and just as briskly drop to freezing point on winter nights. Farming does not come easy in these conditions, the sandy landscape reluctantly affording room for clumps of thorny bushes, and cannot be depended on to provide a reliable source of income.

The district has substantial deposits of minerals, and yet industrial units are few and far between. The sun and wind are ubiquitous though and over the past five years sprouting rapidly on the desert sand have been wind turbines. Some 496 of them together capable of generating a peak of 340 MW have been set up by private investors, including celebrities such as Sachin Tendulkar and Aishwarya Rai. The wind as in most other parts of the country blows strong for about four months in the year, which is why these turbines produce on average 16-22 per cent of their rated annual output. Even that is enough to provide a reasonable return on investment, and given that land is plentiful and with very little use for agriculture, many more windmills will rise on the arid landscape in the coming years.

Unlike the tourists who desert the place during the summer and the monsoon, reducing income of the people in the district to a trickle, the wind turbines will keep turning right through the year, and the local economy may have finally the chance to tick the year round.

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