Tourism has brought real economic benefit, he's clear on that — work in travel agencies, guest houses, shops, trekking, cooking. Many of those jobs, though, are held by people from outside Ladakh entirely. Kashmiri traders, facing a tourism collapse of their own back home amid the political situation there, spend summers here selling souvenirs and winters doing the same in Goa. Roughly seventy percent of Leh's souvenir shops belong to Kashmiris and other outsiders, occupying the prominent main streets, while Ladakhi-owned shops sit further back, on the smaller side streets.
What troubles him more is where the government's money goes. Large sums are spent subsidising cheap rice and flour imported from other parts of India — a policy that undercuts local farmers directly. Organic farming takes more labour and yields less, so an honest price for it has to be higher, and most buyers simply choose the cheaper, chemically grown alternative instead. Street vendors in Leh now sell produce grown with subsidised pesticides — cheaper and faster, but markedly less healthy.
Even the chang does not taste any good if it is not made from organic products.
He's careful to note the damage is contained, for now. Most Ladakhi farmers, particularly in the villages, still practise organic farming and have banned chemicals outright — chemicals can't even be used on trees without killing them, though vegetables are more commonly treated. His hope is that government money would go toward infrastructure — electricity, water, telephone lines — across the whole of Ladakh, rather than into food imports and pesticide subsidies that, in his estimation, amount to money wasted.
The tourist season itself is brutally short — essentially just the summer months, with only a trickle of visitors in winter. Anyone depending on tourism has four months to earn what needs to last the year. Many students work through the summer specifically to fund the school year ahead, since a proper college education still means leaving Ladakh for elsewhere in India — though most do return once they've finished.
Summer and winter in Leh feel like two different places entirely. In summer, everyone is busy, young people dress in Western style, and families have little time together. Winter reverses all of it — people stay home, work closer to hearth, dress traditionally out of practical necessity (Western clothes simply aren't warm enough), and family time returns. In the villages, that traditional rhythm holds year-round regardless of season.
Tourism's expansion has come at farming's direct expense — buildings keep spreading onto fields, shrinking the land actually suited to agriculture around Leh, and once that land is built over, restoring it is close to impossible. Farming here was never easy to begin with: Leh sits as an oasis in a high-altitude desert, almost rainless, entirely dependent on mountain water that's growing more polluted by the year.
He worries less about tourism itself than about how many people are betting everything on it. If the current pace of growth continues, more and more will abandon other trades for tourism — and he doubts the business will stay this good indefinitely.
His one wish for visitors: greater awareness of how fragile this environment really is — requesting organic food where it's offered, and asking for the compost toilet instead of the water-hungry flush one, which freezes solid in winter anyway.