Every long weekend, Gonikoppa main road tells the story before the town does. Bumper-to-bumper cars from Bengaluru crawl up the town and by Saturday noon the homestays are full, the viewpoints are jammed, and the taps in some neighbourhoods are dry. Nobody planned it that way. It simply happened, one booking at a time.
Kodagu is a small district with an outsized job. It is the birthplace of the Cauvery, which feeds the drinking water and farmland of millions downstream. Its coffee estates and forests act as a sponge, soaking up the monsoon and releasing it slowly through the dry months. That sponge is what we are now building over.
The pattern is familiar. Estates are converted to resorts, slopes are cut for access roads, and borewells are sunk deeper. Homestays, once a lovely way for families to earn from their land, have in many places become a cover for full-scale commercial lodging, with little oversight of water use, waste or construction. The 2018 floods and landslides should have been a turning point. They showed what happens when fragile hill slopes are treated as real estate. Yet the building continues, often on the same kinds of slopes.
Now comes the drought. When rains fail or arrive erratically, the first to feel it are not the tourists but the locals: the farmer whose stream has thinned, the household whose well has gone dry, the estate worker who walks further for water. A resort can drill deeper and truck in tankers. A villager cannot. A visitor who stays two nights draws on the same groundwater that a family depends on all year, and the visitor never sees the shortage.
Long weekends make this worse by compressing demand into spikes. A district planned for its resident population is hit with tens of thousands of extra people in 48 hours. Sewage systems, garbage collection, parking, water supply and the roads themselves buckle under the load. What is left behind is plastic on the trails and strain on the people who live there.
None of this is an argument against tourism. Kodagu’s economy needs it, and many families have rightly built livelihoods on hospitality. The question is whether we can keep going as we are, and the honest answer is no. Not with drought as the new normal, not with groundwater falling, and not with a landscape this steep and this fragile.
So what would sustainability actually look like? A few things are not complicated:
A hard carrying capacity. Cap visitor numbers and construction in ecologically sensitive zones, and enforce it.
Real regulation of homestays. Registration, water audits, waste treatment, and a clear line between a genuine homestay and a commercial resort.
No building on slopes and streams. Honour the setbacks and the hazard maps drawn after 2018.
Water first for residents. Meter commercial extraction and give households priority in scarcity.
Spread the load. Dynamic pricing and incentives for midweek and off-season travel would ease the long-weekend crush.
The traveller has a role too. Ask your host where the water comes from. Choose places that treat waste and respect the land. Skip the long weekend if you can.
The Cauvery will keep flowing only as long as its source is healthy. If we love Kodagu for its mist, its forests and its quiet, we have to stop loving it to death. The hills have given generously. The question now is whether we are willing to give something back before the taps run dry ….
By Reshma Gowramma Machamada
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