Mismanagement in the Annual Educational Tour to Kumaon (27th to 31st March, 2012)
Deepro Chakraborty
Lack of information:
No information was given to the students about the plan of the trip. We didn’t even know properly where we are going exactly. Each day in the morning we came to know the destinations.
The M.Phil students knew that they have to pay 1500Rs. for the trip and the M.A. students 500Rs. We were not properly informed that we have to bear the expense of the food further. Everybody ordered food in accordance with his/her own choice and there was no uniformity maintained in ordering food. But the organizers themselves counted the collective amount of the DA and divide and asked us to bear the equal share though everybody did not get the same food.
If we who take non-veg could know it before, we could have arranged our food separately, because nowhere the organizers chose a restaurant where non-veg is also available, though there was a number of such restaurant where both are available.
Miserable planning:
In this Kumaon trip we stayed the 4days in Haldwani city which is just used as the gateway to enter into the Kumaon Himalaya and not at all a place of interest. I myself visited Kumaon twice before, but I hardly see any tourist going to see the Himalaya stays in Haldwani. We visited Almora where we just went to the library of the Kumaon University, which was closed at that time. We didn’t visit any of the ancient temples scattered around Almora due to lack of time. It was our good luck that because of the landslip the bus stopped a few minutes on the bank of river Koshi and we had the pleasure to go into it.
The most pitiable thing is that we were allowed to take meal only once in a day. Every day we took breakfast in the morning and then took lunch or dinner in the evening. A student became ill because of the fast. The same thing was repeated in the three successive days.
Bad accommodation:
One can hardly believe that the students of a renowned university spent the four nights in a dharmasala of a very poor quality. We were provided 4 damp rooms full of the spittle of betel-juice here and there. There were only some mattresses covered by dirty bed covers. There was no bed. We thirty-four students shared four rooms. In some of the rooms there was no plug point where we could charge our mobile phones or cameras. Pillows with dirty ragged cover were provided in the second night. The only things we found washed are the bed-sheets. As I heard from the organizers, the authority of the dharmasala charged per person per night Rs. 50. We shared the common lavatories.
The strangest incident happened at the first night when we just arrived at Haldwani and reached the dharmasala after the long journey around 10:30 pm. We all were very thirsty and hungry that time. There was no drinking water in the rooms of the dharmasala. The room where the water-cooler was kept was latched. Instead of helping us to get water and food we were suggested to drink the water from the tap of the lavatory. Girl students were ordered not to go out in search of food.
We have spent four nights in Kumaon but we just visited Kumaon University library in Nainital, 3-4 very closely located points of Nainital including the Naina Devi temple but excluding the cave, Aryabhatta Research Institutes (Aries) in Nainital, a local Hanuman temple (archaeologically or historically not at all important) and Sattal. We visited Almora but apart from the closed library of the University campus we did not visit any other place of interest there.
I expected the organizers to be more responsible and expert. Our previous tour to Ujjayini was much more systematized and fruitful as well.