Tourism, in their assessment, is useful mainly if you live in Leh. For villagers elsewhere in Ladakh, it barely registers. Travel agencies and shops in town are mostly owned and run by outsiders — people from Jammu, Manali, Srinagar, Delhi — with the government handing out construction loans for hotels and guest houses readily enough. New jobs cluster in trekking — guiding, cooking, portering — and in hotels, shops, restaurants, and travel agencies. Plenty of students take trekking work over the summer specifically to fund the next school year.
Farming has thinned as more people pivot from working the land to running hotels and guest houses instead. Tourism has clearly expanded employment, including for outsiders, but incomes for many locals have stayed flat even as prices climbed — leaving daily life notably more expensive for people who aren't the ones profiting from the tourist trade. New products fill the shelves now — fruit, vegetables, and Western imports like Coca-Cola, which tourists consume and locals mostly don't, though everyone's left dealing with the resulting waste.
One genuine structural win: a tax change now keeps locally collected revenue within Ladakh rather than routing straight to Delhi. Medical services have improved in and around Leh specifically, but nowhere else — hospitals elsewhere are scarce and expensive. The telephone system remains a source of real frustration, mostly confined to Leh and, in their account, plagued by a state-run provider that installs poor lines, charges heavily to fix them, fixes symptoms rather than causes, and routinely overcharges with little recourse for customers.
The content of the textbooks has absolutely no relevance to the lives and culture of the students in Ladakh, which is very demotivating.
Education is improving in quantity, they're careful to say, but not in quality. Ladakhi isn't taught in schools at all — students learn another Indian language and English instead. Teacher training is minimal; anyone who finishes 10th or 12th grade can become a public school teacher without further preparation. Some Kashmiri teachers end up in Ladakh as a disciplinary posting — transferred here as a penalty for misconduct elsewhere, and, unsurprisingly, some barely show up for work at all. More Ladakhi teachers have entered the system in recent years, which they hope will eventually bring down the high exam failure rate. The good colleges all remain outside Ladakh.
Infrastructure is a mixed picture. More villages now have road links, easing travel, but electricity remains badly underfunded — a struggling hydroelectric project delivers at most two or three hours of power a day. Villages still have clean drinking water, unlike Leh, where pollution has worsened and lower-town residents queue daily at a central pump because upper-town use has drained the supply. Bus service has expanded but unevenly, with rising fuel prices pushing fares up alongside it.
Garbage collection runs in the city, where waste gets dumped just above Leh; villages have no collection system at all, though better education has at least improved indoor hygiene, even if streets remain littered. All land and housing legally belongs to residents of Jammu and Kashmir State, of which Ladakh is part — outsiders can't buy property here — though land and house prices have still risen sharply, especially around Leh.
Crime has increased, mostly robbery targeting tourists and shops rather than locals, alongside a rise in drug and alcohol use among young people, often sourced from tourists themselves. Dress has shifted generation to generation — only the elderly still dress traditionally day-to-day, with younger Ladakhis adopting Western clothing, partly from tourist influence and partly from exposure to more modern Indian cities. Arranged marriage still holds in the villages but is giving way to love marriage in the city, alongside genuinely equal employment for women there.
“I think the future of Leh will be horrible if things go on this way,” one member says. “It is going to be very dirty, smelly and polluted. We do need to stop the pollution, otherwise it is going to go all wrong.”