Will Munnar demolitions help Kerala tourism?
By Sanu George. Kerala, India, 11:31 AM IST In the last one week, more than two dozen illegal tourist resorts in the picturesque hill station of Munnar have been razed and 200 more are to be demolished, a move that many say would harm Kerala’s booming tourism industry. The demolition drive, by the no-nonsense Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan, was launched to evict all those who had encroached on government land. ‘The drive would be extended to other parts of the state like Kovalam and Kumarakom. We will under no circumstances be lenient on these encroachers,’ Achuthanandan declared. But tourism watchers say the drive has come at a time when the state is anyway short of 10,000 rooms during the peak tourist season – October to March – and would result in millions of rupees in tourism investment going down the drain. For investment-starved Kerala, tourism is the one sector where small and big investors have flocked in large numbers and has seen around Rs.10 billion investment in the last
