Nearly every Ladakhi farmer started out organic. When the government began subsidising chemical pesticides, most tried them for a while — and most have since gone back to organic methods, having seen the risks. What hasn't gone away is the competition: subsidised, chemically grown food from elsewhere in India comes in bigger, cheaper, and undercuts organic Ladakhi produce at every turn, despite the extra labour organic farming demands.
Tourism has brought money, guest houses, hotels, shops, guides, travel agencies, and a flood of new products, plus construction, carpentry, and plumbing work — most of it, notably, filled by workers from outside Ladakh. Leh looks prosperous next to the surrounding villages, but the wages tell a different story: companies bring in cheap outside labour to fill the jobs, and only a small share of the money that circulates through hotels, shops, and travel agencies ends up in Ladakhi hands.
Farming is fading as young people gravitate toward tourism work in Leh instead — work that only exists for part of the year. Outside workers, mostly Tibetan and Kashmiri, clear out for winter too, many heading to Goa. What has grown steadily, strikingly so, is the number of taxis on Leh's streets — sixty to a hundred more every year, by one estimate, and reassuringly, all Ladakhi-owned, helped along by loans the government hands out fairly easily.
Rural people think that tourism is the way to go. They do not see the potential of Ladakh.
Traditional skills — natural dyeing, spinning, carpentry — are disappearing as tourism absorbs people's time and offers faster, more exciting money. A traditional woven dress, once something people made themselves, now costs roughly 2,000 rupees to buy — forty-five dollars — pushing most people toward cheaper imitation instead. In the villages, some transactions still run on barter rather than cash entirely; the original Ladakhi bread, notably, is never sold for money — only traded.
Mass-produced goods, heavily advertised with big Indian celebrities and free-gift promotions, are now easier to find than authentic Ladakhi products, even in the villages themselves. Inflation has climbed steadily since tourism took hold, and because tourists spend more freely than locals, businesses have started charging locals the same higher prices — tourism, in effect, competing with residents over their own goods.
Healthcare has genuinely improved — the government-subsidised hospital charges only two rupees for treatment, though Western medicine is steadily displacing traditional practice. More banks means more choice, though house insurance remains essentially unheard of; car insurance, by contrast, is compulsory.
Infrastructure is where frustration runs deepest. Electricity runs only a few hours a day, unreliably, from a hydroelectric station prone to breakdowns; many households keep a diesel generator as backup. Water distribution has grown badly skewed — hotels in the upper town draw so much from the mountain supply that lower-town households queue daily at communal pumps, a shift from the more even distribution across fields and gardens that used to hold. There's no proper sewage system either, and pollution in village water sources continues largely unchecked.
I think there are more soldiers than Ladakhis in Ladakh nowadays.
That shift matters to him beyond the practical: where families once sent a son or two to the monastery, they now send them to the army instead — a change he traces to a rising military presence since 1962, now outweighing religious life in sheer numbers. Theft has risen too, largely tied to outside construction workers left stranded and unpaid once a job wraps up.
Culturally, tourism has reshaped even the calendar — a monastery festival moved from winter to summer specifically to draw more visitors, something a genuine Ladakhi festival, tied to a fixed date and purpose, was never meant to accommodate. Social cohesion has thinned generally, though the Women's Alliance still manages to bring people together through its village and regional meetings. Arranged marriage is giving way, gradually, to love marriage; respect for elders and religious figures has noticeably eroded; and school quality has slipped even as SECMOL has pushed for modest improvement.
“It would be good,” he says, “if tourists and locals would interact more, so there would also be a socio-cultural exchange, not just an economic one.”