The slow degradation of a hill station is rarely a sudden event; it is a gradual erosion of public space that is often invisible until the system hits a breaking point. For over a decade, my family and I have visited Valparai annually. In recent years, the "quiet retreat" has become a victim of its own success.....or more accurately, a victim of urban planning that refuses to catch up with commercial reality. And this problem is not too different from what many hill towns in India face! So, as a thought experiment I thought of "pretending" that this is largely a State responsibity (which it is not - we have a huge problem of irresponsible tourist behaviour more often by the educated and often the well-off indulging in consumer choices that are deeply problematic - but on that some other time) ### The "Responsibility" Trap When a tourist destination becomes overwhelmed, the framing is almost always centered on individual responsibility. We talk about the "irresponsible tourist" who litters or the driver who blocks a hairpin bend. While individual ethics matter, this narrative is a convenient distraction from a much larger failure of governance. In Valparai, we are seeing a classic externalization of costs. Private lodges maximize their profit by building rooms far beyond the physical capacity of their site. They don’t provide parking; instead, they "export" that burden onto the public streets and, remarkably, into the compounds of government residences (like the Valparai Tahsildar’s home). ### Nudging the State into Action Rather than just lamenting the traffic, we decided to use the administrative levers available to us. This involved back-researching the Tamil Nadu District Municipalities (Hill Stations) Building Rules, 1993. Key realizations from the research: - **The DC’s Power:** Under Rule 217-J, the District Collector has the explicit authority to seal commercial premises that violate their original building plans. - **The Parking Nexus:** Modern building rules (TNCDBR 2019) mandate specific car-to-room ratios. Most lodges in Valparai are in active violation of this the moment they direct a guest to park on a public road. We filed a formal representation to the District Collector and followed it up with a targeted RTI. > [!PLACEHOLDER] > <iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/valparai-urban-planning-letter-redacted" width="560" height="384" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe> > Screenshot 1: The Letter to the Collector > > Highlighting the citations of Rule 217-C and the specific mention of the Tahsildar’s residence misuse. > [!PLACEHOLDER] > > Screenshot 2: The RTI filed to the Valparai Municipality (to be updated) > > Querying the approved parking capacity of specific lodges near government assets. ### Status: #tracking - **December 2025:** Letter dispatched to Collector and CC’d to MP/MLA. - **December 2025:** RTI filed at Valparai Taluk office. - **Awaiting:** Official response and physical clearance of the Tahsildar’s compound. ### The Public Health Parallel This tension between State responsibility vs. Individual responsibility isn’t unique to urban planning; it is the central friction point in modern public health. We see this same phenomenon in chronic disease management. Just as the town admin blames "bad tourists" for traffic instead of fixing zoning laws, the health system often blames "bad lifestyle choices" for diabetes while ignoring the "food deserts" or lack of walkable infrastructure that makes those choices inevitable. I’ve explored this at length in a paper I co-wrote **Beyond behaviour as individual choice: A call to expand understandings around social science in health research** ([PubMed: 34622015](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34622015/)). The core argument remains the same: you cannot demand individual responsibility in a system where the state has failed to provide a responsible environment.