The two-day Elephanta festival which ended on Saturday may have brought more public attention to the spectacular caves, but there has not been much to cheer for the state tourism department as it has not been able to remove the unauthorised shops run by people from the three villages in the island.
Although the tourism department is trying to develop Elephanta island in a way appropriate for a world heritage site, rehabilitation of the shopkeepers is proving to be a major roadblock. Conservationists and tourism officials agree that Elephanta will not regain its historical pristine look without the removal of these shops. There are about 25 shops, all unauthorised, along the stairway leading from the jetty to the caves.
The villagers have no other source of income except selling of trinkets, coloured stones, little elephants carved in marble etc to tourists. The island is too small (2 square kilometres) for agriculture and there is not enough space to shift the shops some distance away from the caves.
Bhushan Gagrani, Managing Director of Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation, said that his predecessors have even considered the possibility of giving the shopkeepers training in job skills, so that they could do other work, but there’s no demand for such skills on the island.
According to Gagrani, the option of removing the few hundred villagers from the island would mean taking away their livelihood. “If we provide them with some other place, tourists won’t go there,” he said.
“This idea, moreover, is inhumane and would be intolerable to UNESCO, which gave the world heritage site status to Elephanta,” said Tasneem Mehta of INTACH, a conservationist who drew up the area development plan for Elephanta in 2002.
One place where the resettlement idea worked is the Ajanta caves. There too, shops were strangling the heritage site. In 2002, the MTDC resettled the shops in a specially-built shopping complex at Bhardapur, three kilometres away.
However, as of now, MTDC is implementing parts of the Elephanta redevelopment plan. It has installed new solar-powered lamps along the pathways and the tiled pathways around the cave have been re-done. In addition, Gagrani said, MTDC is rebuilding the public toilet near the jetty and covering up the jetty at a cost of Rs 1 crore, provided by the Ministry of Tourism which has promised a kitty of Rs 25 crore for the works on Elephanta.
Earlier, in the 1990’s during the first two phases of the redevelopment plan, the Archaeological Survey of India had completed restoration of the caves—erased the graffiti by the visitors and buttressed the cave pillars. The state tourism department and INTACH converted the caretaker’s hut into a mini-museum focussing on the caves.
Now, besides the jetty and the toilet construction, the third phase includes removal of the shops.