Siliguri faces space jam

Siliguri, June 9: Thousands of tourists poured into Siliguri this afternoon looking for accommodation or means of transport to go home following the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s call for an indefinite strike in the hills from tomorrow.

“We had reached Darjeeling yesterday and wanted to spend four days there,” Motilal Kothari of Calcutta said. “But we were forced to cut short our trip and somehow managed to come down to Siliguri. Now we find that it is just as hard to find accommodation here or get a transport to return to Calcutta.”

Hotels in the trade hub appeared to be quickly running out of rooms.

“All our rooms were booked by 8pm and we had to turn away many tourists,” said Vivek Baid, the vice-president of Cinderella Hotel here.

The situation was the same at Sinclair’s Hotel. “Till now, more than 100 tourists have come looking for rooms, but we could not accommodate most of them,” a front desk employee said in the evening.

Raj Basu, a Siliguri-based tour operator, said the rush would increase: “Tourists in remote destinations in North Sikkim like Lachung and Lachen are making frantic attempts to get to Siliguri before midnight,” he said.

Basu added that he was looking for accommodation for more than 25 tourists scheduled to arrive late at night from North Sikkim.

“I have called up more than 20 hotels and all of them are full. Now I am ringing up friends and relatives looking for empty flats or rooms that they can spare,” Basu said.

Getting transport out of Siliguri is proving to be equally difficult.

“Trains and flights are anyway fully booked for the next few days, this being the peak tourist season. The next few days will be a nightmare,” said Deepak Gupta, another tour operator.

Today’s development will be a huge blow to the tourism industry in the hills, said experts.

Jalpaiguri district magistrate R Ranjit, who has authored a book on tourism in the Darjeeling hills, said: “Building on my calculations made in 2003-2004, even a conservative estimate would put the daily tourist foot-fall in the hills at 8,000 during a season. If the average daily expenditure of a tourist is taken to be Rs 1,000, the revenue of the tourism sector in the hills would be at least Rs 80 lakh a day.”

With Gangtok and the Dooars added, the daily inflow of tourists would be about 20,000 to 25,000, Gupta added.