Mawlynnong, India, transformed by tourism, bans visitors on Sundays
bbc.com
bbc.com
Of course it is true that a lot of Indians have no civic sense, and will spit, litter, and generally make a noisy nuisance of themselves in this quiet village. On the surface it seems to be a great story about that nuisance being kicked out one day of the week.
At the same time, this is part of...India. It seems questionable legally, and also morally, to just kick out people from the rest of the country and even the state on a a specific day. Your village benefits to some degree from their taxes. How would it be if the villagers were locked into their village for that day and not allowed to travel outside?
Is the solution to a lack of civic sense really just to make more and more of these clean enclaves? Will they finally end up expanding and covering more of the country? I would honestly feel better about this if the entire state of Meghalaya had some kind of cleanliness drive and a tourist tax.
I don't have any easy solutions. If I did, they would have occurred to someone in India and it would be a lot cleaner by now.
Did you read the article?
Imagine that some town in the US did this; and shut down otherwise public roads to anyone who is not a resident or a guest of a hotel in the town for the weekend, citing visitor nuisance as the reason.
Would you feel better about it because "well you can just book a hotel for the weekend"?
It's the same precedent most Himachalis use to keep tourists contained to a handful of tourist traps while keeping the rest of the state clean. Other border states and Northeastern states do the same thing.
Semi-urban areas like Mawlynnong are governed by Panchayats - not municipal councils - and overtourism can become a kiss of death.
The state in India I mentioned (Himachal Pradesh) has a large tourism industry, but because of strict zoning laws was able to reduce the overall impact of tourism and zone SEZs and industrial parks which helped MSMEs climb up the value chain in industries such as generic pharma manufacturing and food processing.
If hotel and homestay zoning was lax, there would have been less of an incentive for local capital to invest in capex heavy but ultimately higher value economic output. And it was that economic output that helped HP subsidize it's welfare system that was able to bring the state's HDI to middle of the pack Chinese province levels despite not having a single metro with population greater than 200k.
I hadn't thought of it from your PoV but it makes sense.
And I had just been to the Sar pass trek from Kasol, and let me tell you. It's insanely over crowded right now. Despite the regulations.
On our trek we easily had 300+ people at 13k feet!
So I fully support such decisions because small towns can't handle such crowd
Same for Kedarnath.
Permits need to be issued with the carrying capacity of the land in mind.
Bhutan seems to pull this off well.
As for Himachal, you seem to be the expert but I thought that Himachal disallows non-locals from buying land (which I also think is wrong), not staying anywhere? Or does Himachal also have laws like this?
Non-locals are allowed to stay anywhere in HP, but zoning is strictly enforced so you aren't going to find some hotel or B&B in the middle of nowhere without it being zoned as non-agricultural land.
This helps limit tourism to a handful of urban hubs, which helps limit overtourism to a handful of areas that have essentially been written off.
That said, significant swathes of Himachal fall within the Protexted Area Permit and outsiders need permission from the Home Ministry for extended stays, and often get stopped by police or ITBP for checkings (unsurprising given that we neighbor Tibet and plenty of communities have ethnic ties with residents of Ngari).
> I doubt this has been given judicial review at the High Court/Supreme Court level
Tribal Councils and Panchayats in Meghalaya are allowed to use customary law to limit outsiders, and this has been adjudicated by the Meghalaya HC as well.
Meghalaya also falls under the Sixth Schedule which was explicitly made to ensure that tribal areas aren't inundated by more numerous outside ethnic groups.
They want to reduce people who visit without staying. For Sunday is their day for mass etc
Also most businesses are still closed on the Sunday because the town is Christian
Again, none of this makes it right. It's medieval-style thinking to just put up a gate on Sundays to keep all the "trippers" out as you put it. What if every city and town in India started doing this?
But I've lived my entire life in India so far.
Most cities and towns won't do this because this affects only a handful of extremely small tourist places which are cool like have snow so they attract 80% of our 1 billion population who choose to be tourists.
I get your overall point though. But major cities just don't suffer from the same problems! Say Chennai or Mumbai or Trivendrum or Kochi or anybody else - this is simply not a problem. They don't have over tourism.
And such decisions will not be taken anywhere else in India
It might not be tourism specifically, but major cities have a huge problem with net migration into the cities, typically from rural areas. This causes overcrowding, slums, and a ton of pressure on land and water. Logically, the cities should also be free to ban "outsiders" from coming in for whatever time they want. After all, the outsiders are encroaching on their way of life!
Great, let's ban anyone from entering Chennai or Mumbai unless they own or rent land there, or have a confirmed hotel booking! We can set up checkpoints at the city boundaries, and require anyone coming in to show these proofs.
See how quickly this logic can fall apart if everyone starts applying it?
This is not the first small tourist place to set restrictions as far as I know so yeah this won't be a slippery slope any time soon
For example, if people from the rest of India are not allowed to buy land in Himachal, it seems only fair that Himachalis who own land in Himachal should not be allowed to buy land anywhere else in India. Sooner or later people are going to come to that logical conclusion.
So many places in India have been reduced to a shit show of filth because of not drawing a line.
Many places use an adaptive system of tickets/permits to keep tourist attractions attractive.
I wouldn't mind queuing up for permits if the upshot is a better experience and civic minded fellow travellers.
I would be highly supportive of prosecuting and fining people creating a shit show of filth, regardless of whether it's locals or tourists. Why not apply the law equally to both if the locals are so confident that they don't litter?
> Many places use an adaptive system of tickets/permits to keep tourist attractions attractive.
That is not what's going on here though. A reasonable permit system that controls numbers seems fairer than some randos putting up a gate and blocking a public road.
When the government is absent in its role people/communities do self-organize. As long as local defacto controllers do not resort to things like honor killing, honor rapes like they do in the Haryana belt I am very much for local and distributed control and empowerment.
Regarding stringent anti-littering laws, enforcement has proven nigh impossible exactly where it's required the most. The only discernible difference would be more corruption funded pocket money for the local police. I would be so happy to be proven wrong.
Even with effective anti-littering in place, many places would still need to control the volume of footfalls.
Really saddened by the filth in around Kedarnath. It used to be so pristine before.
> Some tourists have complained about the ban, saying it should have been implemented on a weekday instead
These should not be a thing. What is it that makes folk feel so entitled?
"Lack of litter bins"; isn't an excuse. I've seen folk stand next to a litter bin, light up and then throw the cigarettes end to the ground.
You're literally standing next to a litter bin!
It should be common sense not to spit nor to litter. Spitting is the worse and I see it all the time here in the UK.
What the hell is wrong with people?
At first I couldn't understand how someone who lives so close to nature could do something like that. But then I realized that when the parents were kids, those snacks were probably wrapped in banana leaves, not plastic, so discarding the leaves on the ground would have been perfectly natural thing to do.
"Laat niet, als dank voor het aangenaam verpoozen, den eigenaar van 't bosch de schillen en de doozen"
(old-ish Dutch spelling. From ~1930). Translated:
"Leave not as thanks for your pleasant stay, the owner of the forest the peels and the boxes". (google for pix, they're nice!)
Today, I'd be a happy camper if it were just peels & cardboard since both bio-degrade. Unlike most other litter (smoking-related and balloons among my 'favourites').
But it's definitely a cultural thing. Learn kids @ a young age, problem goes away.
If the law ruled: "you may not traverse through the state on Sundays"; then one could argue that is a breach of human rights.
However, the last time I checked, detours exist. Enabling you to bypass a village that may be closed on Sundays.
If you're a tourist and a village says no, why can't you obey that, why does that upset you?
Or in Seinfeld speak, “we live in a society!!!”
Have to consider others not just oneself. That’s the price of freedom and being responsible about it.
The alternative is a nanny state or anarchy.
In parts of Asia where people chew betel nut, of course that’s a different story -they put the old west custom of spitting tobacco chew to shame.
Spitting is still super common in many cities, especially in India. I've had a few taxi drivers who would open their door periodically to spit on the ground (and no they weren't chewing anything).
I only really have experience with Americans and Bangladeshis, but in my experience Americans are Nazis about littering and recycling. I was talking with a law school professor once after class and dropped a diet coke bottle into the trash in front of her. Without missing a beat she reached into the trash bin to take it out and threw it into the recycling bin.
I don't know about that. I've seen many a poorly sorted recycle bin in my life. Americans are definitely in the upper quartile, maybe even the upper decile, of the world as a whole. Among the developed world the country may be just about average.
I believe glass recycling is segregated by color in some countries in Europe. And they take that really seriously.
I guess my bar is on the floor lol.
America is a really big place.
My "progressive" American city has a lot of litter, because there is no money to clean it up or punish litterers.
I've been in quite a few American cities where recycling bins simply do not exist.
If the litter bin doesn’t have an ashtray (like most in the US), maybe they were worried about starting a trash fire?
Culture is real.
In terms of actually responding to eco-disaster I don't think people are there yet to see error and mend their ways. I do not expect this to change at least for next couple of decades.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of information on the change on the Internet (at least not the English Internet), but this Japanese guy's anecdotes seem to corroborate it [2]. It makes sense, a lot of countries started taking pollution and littering more seriously around the 70s. It looks like that's when Japan started regulating it seriously [3]:
> from 24 November to 18 December 1970, 14 pollution control bills were passed into law [...] overnight, Japan was transformed from a country with meagre environmental regulations, to one of the strictest in the OECD.
1. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PP60G-lMiDA
When they are able/willing to enforce consequences for bad behavior, most of India's civic problems will evaporate.
That's because of zoning. Much of Gurgaon isn't zoned as a municipality but as villages or agricultural land, which means there is no unified municipal government in vast swathes of the city. This is the same issue with Bangalore.
Other large Indian cities (eg. Pune, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, etc) are nowhere near as bad
> So I was particularly glad to see this story was about an Indian village
My ancestral family is from village and small towns, and counterintuitively (edit: for people who do not know India) they tend to be much cleaner because they have more formally defined municipal and local governments.
Of course, this depends state to state, like everything else in India.
Edit: quick explaination of local government in India
Local government in India is heavily dependent on whether your block is zoned as "rural", "urban", "agricultural", or "industrial".
In the first generation of megacities like Bangalore and Delhi NCR, zoning never actually got updated because a lot of urbanization happened before zoning caught up, and changing zoning could impact your tax burden, as agricultural income isn't taxed in India.
So if you are a landlord (eg.) running a backpacker hostel in Delhi, if your land was rezoned from agricultural to urban it would also be reassessed from a tax burden perspective so landlords have an incentive to fight rezoning tooth and nail.
Additionally, a lot of areas that are colloquially called (eg.) Bangalore aren't actually within the borders of the city of Bangalore but historically unzoned or miszoned land.
In smaller towns and the newer generation of megacities (eg. Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune) zoning was more tightly enforced and local governments are more aligned becuase they are much more homogenous.
This is something the PM Office is now starting to address [0], but will also depend on local and state governments. Some states like Kerala, HP, TN, Punjab, and Gujarat have been more proactive about fixing zoning, but others like Delhi and Karnataka have been less inclined.
[0] - https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/EAC-PM-Worki...
Additionally, the local government and the federal government have been at loggerheads for over decade because it's municipal government was ruled by the BJP but it's state government was ruled by the opposition (AAP), so both attempted to undermine the other.
Delhi NCR and Bangalore are two of the worst managed metropolitan areas in India from a local government perspective because of overlapping jurisdictions and extremely wonky zoning. Of course, those are the two Indian cities most HNers historically ended up visiting.
That said, it's highly likely most non-Desi HNers haven't visited India since 2020 because most businesses now send Indian Americans directly to India and India was never a strong tourism market aside from diaspora.
[0] - https://theprint.in/ground-reports/lal-dora-villages-delhi-h...
The key difference is zoning is nowhere near as screwy in those metros compared to Gurgaon. Gurgaon's urbanization in 1990s to 2010s was completely unplanned. It was the literal Wild West.
Same with Bangalore compared to other large metros in Karnataka like Mangalore and Mysore.
Indian, and this is not counterintuitive to me at all. I have also seen this, really small rural villages with their tight local governments tend to be pretty clean.
In essence, India had hidden urbanization occur [0], but zoning never caught up to it.
[0] - https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/EAC-PM-Worki...
The only exception where rezoning has actually been done properly is hyderabad.
Here is the reason for this:
- The 74th amendment in india only calls for a _planning commitee_ (reminiscent of india's past) for any area with a population of over 10 lakh. But this MPC is completely distinct from the organisation that does the actual service delivery. In Chennai's example, the CMDA are the planning guys, and the GCC (greater chennai corporation) are the execution guys who actually employ garbage collection folks, buy cleaning machines, fix storm water drains, etc etc,.
CMDA covers ~6000 sq. km. and all that is practically chennai, and they plan bus stops and FSI and roads and all that across this region. However, the GCC is _still_ limited _to this day_ to just 500 sq. km and this is the "chennai" that appears in reports. So all your sanitation workers and clean roads, tree lined roads, good storm water drains, etc, that you see in say besant nagar, are completely absent in the remaining 5500 sq. km. Instead, you have multiple different corporations, Tambaram, Avadi, Kanchipuram, etc, and the coordination problems here are just insane. It also absolutely does not help that political fracturing happens due to dominant castes differing across these regions. You also lose the simple concept of rich people cross subsiding poor people - which is essential in any public service. The taxes paid by boat club road residents, remain with the GCC, and does not contribute even a little bit towards better roads on land under the Tambaram corporation, ironically leading to worse infrastructure for even the boat club road resident making a trip to Trichy. So you get nice parks and heart-shaped traffic lights in nungambakkam before even a road is paved in thoraipakkam.
In hyderabad, they did a very nice thing. They merged 27 ULBs directly into the GHMC, tripling its area from 650 to 2000 sq. km. So its the same thing CMDA did but through a merger. Those 27 bodies - with their staff, their ward councillors, their budgets - are now part of GHMC. The sanitation workers who used to report to, say, Medipally Municipality now report to GHMC. The property tax collected there now goes into GHMC's budget. The roads there are now GHMC's responsibility to maintain.
This unified thing devoid of coordination problems and with great cross subsidisation seems to work much better. It will be a good model for other cities to follow.
I don't know about amdavad and pune but I am willing to bet they are also good for similar reasons.
Mawlynnong is barely 3,000 feet from Bangladesh, and the nearest town to it in Bangladesh (Jaflong - roughly 5 to 10 miles away) is much dirtier [0] despite also being inhabited by the same ethnic group (Khasi) as well.
The main difference is, Meghalaya has much stronger local government whereas it's much weaker in Sylhet.
Given that both Jaflong and Mawlynnong are inhabited by ethnic brethren of the same culture, the cultural argument clearly doesn't hold in comparison to the state capacity argument.
> But in Mawlynnong, children are taught to tidy up from a young age, with many taking to the streets each morning before school to sweep the town of dead leaves and empty rubbish bins. Villagers see to the disposal of biodegradables and take pride in public landscaping.
Socializing children to have certain values and habits is exactly how you create culture.
Besides, most garbage in most Indian cities/towns is not consumer litter in the first place. Side note: this is why 'guarded' areas such as metro stations are spotless.
This needs to be a thing everywhere. Education works to resolve most - if not all - social issues.
If it were so simple this would've been solved nation wide by Modi's 2014 address.
Where does this education come from? Leaders, but leaders are product of their social environment. To create this change means to go against the norm meaning someone or a few have to break the trend. Then that belief has to take hold in others and THEN the real test begins. It has to be generational, the new generation, by yes, education, needs it to be truth as opposed to a new way. The old guard must die.
Only then will you "solve all social issues by education". Don't even get me started on scale. It works on a village or small country, but more? or a 2nd issue?
It's some combination of moral education, culture, science, and psychology. Even religion can play a role, especially in India where it's so important for a majority of the people.
I kind of know what you mean, but feel like we are going into No True Scotsman territory with the "well, that's not what education really means".
Degrees and such are typically the yardstick by which education is measured; if attainment of this education as measured by those yardsticks does not correlate with cleanliness, then the conclusion must be "The education system in India is broken and we should emphasize cleanliness in the education system" rather than "Education will solve cleanliness, it's that simple".
What? How is this supposed to work?
But it also highlights how you need to restrict access to move up the value chain. Hordes of bus tourists who eat elsewhere or bring take away contribute little economically, you can sell some trinkets. People with a hotel booking are also likely to eat locally.
Venice faces a similar situation with cruise ships and Airbnbs raising the price of housing. They should be capping cruise ship numbers, and a weekend break would be good too.
You could tweak it in many ways, like additional levy that can be recouped by spending on food in local restaurants (vs shipboard all-inclusive meals).
I don't think this fits the story at all. They just want a day off. The rest of the week is unrestricted.
Especially since the article gives me the impression you're still supposed to leave pretty quickly on those Sundays, that it's more like an easement than a day pass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_sales_ban_in_Singa...
> Visitors who book guesthouse rooms in Mawlynnong through Saturday and Sunday are exempt from the Sunday ban.
The actual content is about a self-proclaimed 'Asia's cleanest village' in India, banning Sunday visits from other domestic Indians.
Probably wouldn't be a popular story if this was revealed in the title.
Japan is Japan.