Most of what tourists pay to visit Dolpa — service charges, government revenue — is collected and spent in Kathmandu, contributing to the national economy while Dolpa itself sees only a fraction return for local development. He has no objection to organised groups arriving self-sufficient in food, equipment, and porters; his concern is that this same self-sufficiency is exactly what keeps money from reaching the local economy at all.
Tourism has not been able to provide direct benefit to the local people of Dolpa.
Poor awareness of how to actually capture that benefit is part of the problem, in his view, but so is government policy: Nepal currently restricts entry to organised groups rather than allowing Free Individual Tourists, and he'd like to see that change. Individual travellers, he argues, would interact more with local people, spend more locally, and create a genuine multiplier effect — a market for tourist products, a trained local workforce, better sanitation awareness, more local goods sold.
The organised-group model has already cost the district something concrete: several lodges along the trekking routes have closed, since groups traveling with their own supplies never use them. Even a decade after Shey Phoksundo opened to tourism, hotel development in the area remains thin, largely for this reason.
Employment gains have mostly flowed to porters; guides and support staff still come overwhelmingly from outside Dolpa, and even carpenters are brought in from elsewhere — a pattern he attributes partly to a simple lack of exposure among local people to the business side of tourism.
Dolpa has started to become merely a ‘wastebasket’ after accumulation of waste year after year.
The maths troubles him: the cost of tourism, in his assessment, now outweighs its benefit. Only a small share of the revenue collected actually funds local development, while local authorities carry full responsibility for tourist safety regardless of what the district gets back. Price increases in Dolpa, he's careful to distinguish, come from transport difficulty rather than tourism itself — and notably, tourists pay the same prices locals do, without markup.
Change has been gradual and largely benign — shifting architecture, evolving lifestyle — helped along by Dolpa's relative isolation, which has kept its culture largely intact. A visit from the late King Birendra two decades back stands out as the single biggest catalyst for local change, more than tourism itself has managed.
Safety, he insists, isn't really in question — Dolpa is safe on its own terms, whatever guarantees the government can or can't formally offer. What outside investment could genuinely help with: infrastructure, education, and health, all still under-resourced relative to the district's size — the largest in Nepal, stretched thin against limited funds.
Dunai's population has grown mixed — northern traders passing through each winter, southern shopkeepers who've settled and opened businesses, though none, so far, have bought land. Despite getting little in return, he notes, Dolpa's people have shown tourists nothing but warmth. “They have shown their friendly manner and good feeling towards the tourists so far,” he says.