Nine months into the post, the district's Chief District Officer doesn't see much tangible benefit reaching local people from tourism — the real winners, in his assessment, are the travel agencies based in Kathmandu. Closing that gap, he believes, comes down to skills and empowerment, and NGOs and community-based organisations have a real role to play there. His office has been actively encouraging that work, pushing local groups to build awareness and develop tourism-linked income opportunities.
Dolpa's natural resources represent enormous untapped opportunity, in his view — the constraint isn't the resource, it's that local people haven't identified how to capture long-term value from it, compounded by what he describes as a weak local appetite for sustained hard work.
Most of the local people go to collect herbs in June and July and can easily earn one hundred thousand rupees per kilogram, which is enough for one year to live without working.
Given numbers like that, it's not hard to see why herb collection competes so easily with the slower, less certain returns tourism development might offer. On the environmental and cultural side, he sees little cause for alarm — the volume of tourists coming through remains too small to generate much waste or cultural disruption worth worrying about.
Crime, more broadly, is low, and he credits a ban on alcohol with keeping it that way — less money wasted on drink, fewer of the problems that tend to follow it.
His hope for Dolpa's future rests less on growth than on preservation of what already makes it distinctive: a ‘Hidden Treasure’ offering something different to each visitor — rare flora for botanists, dramatic scenery for nature lovers, genuine quiet for anyone escaping city life, and, as filmmaker Eric Valli found, striking enough imagery to build a documentary around.