Walking on a white path

Close to two and half million tourists visited  the main palace in Mysore and all of hem had to remove their footware if they wanted to enter the palace.

The main palace is the most visited building in the world after Madam Tussads in London. But unlike Madam Tussads, all visitors here have to compulsorily remove their footware if they want to have a glimpse of the interiors of  what tourists say is the world’s best palace.    

However, the walk from the ticket counter to the palace interiors and from there to the Maharaja’s private museum will be a rather “hot” one during summer. The sand and concrete pathway to the palace gets so hot during March, April, May and June that tourists, particularly foreigners, find it difficult to tread across the hot sands.

The summer experience of  bare foot walking was all the more painful this year when Mysore experienced a torrid climate and temperatures soared, making people fret and fume.

Many visitors and others, particularly foreigners and they number more than 10,000, complained to the Mysore Palace Board about the boiling sand they would have to walk on to reach the palace. Women, elderly and children found it difficult to walk barefoot. Seeing their discomfiture, the board decided to take a leaf from the Dharmastala temple management which had paved the footpaths leading to the Manjanutha temple with heat resistant slabs.

These newly designed walkways gave pilgrims at Dharmastala a little relief from the sweltering summer. The Mysore Palace Board decided to go in for such a walkway so as to make walking a  walking a pleasure for tourists, even as they enjoyed the sight of the palace.

It, therefore, built a 150-feet heat-resistant walkway on a trial basis, which it plans to extend to other areas in a phased manner. The walkway is about two feet wide and it has been painted white. The white paint will absorb the heat and thus ensure that the soles do not get scorched by the heat of the sand.   

The white paint does not allow the heat to settle and disperses it. The paint diffuses the ultra violet rays and, therefore, the temperature remains much less than the temperature on the concrete.

The Board has spent Rs. 42 per square feet to develop the 150-feet walkway. It now plans to extend the white pathway to other paths that tourists take within the palace compound.

In vase you visit the palace, walk on the white path and ten on the concrete so that you can literally fell the difference.

How we wish that the Government takes notice and ensures that similar heat resistant walkways are introduced at major tourist attractions and in places where the Sun seems to shine the brightest such as Badami, Aihole, Pattadakal, Banashankari, Mahakuta, Gulbarga, Bidar, Raichur, Hampi, Bijapur, Lakkundi, Lakshmeshwar and many other town and villages. As it is these places record high temperatures during summer and walking on the road or even footpath barefoot is a nightmare, more so if it is a place of  religion.  

Summers don't matter in this palace

This summer Mysore experienced a severe water shortage and this could have multiplied had not Hemavathy water be let into the Krishna Raja Sagar (KRS) Dam to meet the drinking water needs of the growing populace.

This summer also saw a large number of tourists making a beeline to Mysore and its famed surroundings. Almost every tourist who came to Mysore never went back without seeing the main palace or the Mysore palace, Chamundi Hills and the  Zoological gardens.

The scorching summer left scores of tourists parched for water and the sight of the animals in the zoo was pitiable. But strangely, there was no water shortage in the palace premises, which even today remains the second highest visited monument in India after the Taj Mahal in Agra, Uttar Pradesh.

If the main palace attracted 30 lakhs tourists and visitors in 2012, nearly 35 lakhs had visited the magnificent three-storied Indo-Sarcenic structure whose foundation was laid in 1897 and completed in 1912. The palace, designed by Sir Henry Irwin, cost a little more than R. 41 lakhs.

The palace, Palace Board members say, did not suffer much from the severe water crunch that affected almost all localities of Mysore. This is because of the huge tanks that were built by the Wodeyar Kings when they built the palace.

The terrace of the palace has no less than a dozen water tanks with a combined capacity of 1.20 lakhs litres of water. These tanks not only provide water to the members of the royal family still living in a portion of the palace but also to the offices of the Palace board and lakhs of visitors.

These water storage tanks are on the third floor of the palace and are under the domes of the structure. Each tank has been so designed that it can store 10,000 litres of water. Of the 12 tanks, six provide water to the Palace and the rest provide water to the offices of Mysore Palace Board.

The tanks have been so constructed that they keep the palace cool even in sweltering summers. Till recently, Cauvery water was pumped directly into these tanks but this has now been stooped and the eight borewells within the palace compound have taken over this job.

Each borewell is fitted with a 5 HP motor and they pump 30,000 litres of water to these overhead tanks. By the way, the fire extinguishers in the palace care connected directly to these tanks and in case of a fire, they can be used to douse the flames.

The palace is one of the few in India to have rainwater harvesting. The Palace Board has joined hands with the National Institute of Engineering to harvest 23 lakh liters of rain water. Two huge tanks, one with a capacity of 14.58 lakh litres and another with a capacity of 8.58 lakh litres, have been constructed in the palace compound to store rain water and when they are full, they can meet the water needs for an entire year.

The palace had harvested 60 lakh litres of rain water last year and it has set a goal of harvesting  one crore litres through surface water rain water harvesting during the current monsoon.

Rain water harvesting is taken up by he board in five stages. In the first stage, 80,000 litres of water is stored and in the second stage 2.2 lakh litres of water is stored. In the third phase it is 3.2 lakh litres of water, four lakh litres of water is stored and the last stage would see 10 lakh litres stored. This process will be repeated ten times an year to achieve the target of  one crore litres.

Rivalling the Taj

It is among the most famous monuments of India. It rivals the Taj Mahal of Agra in drawing visitors and along with the Mughal monument, it is also the most visited monument in India.

For some years, this monument beat the Taj Mahal in drawing the number of visitors. Now, it gives the Taj close competition in drawing visitors and it is also on the list of  must see monuments of the world.

Even the venerable “The New York Times” recently listed it as one of the 31 must-see places on Earth for two years in a row.
This is the magnificent main palace of Mysore which houses some of the most stunning exhibits of the world, including the stupendous Golden throne (this is exhibited only during the Dassara), the Golden Howdah, the armoury (This again is not open to the public) and a variety of artifacts that boggles the mind.     

Year after year, the Mysore palace has been thronging the palace and neither natural calamities nor any other disaster or manmade obstacle has lessened its charm.

The palace in 2012-13 drew an incredible 3 million visitors, just a fraction less than the Taj Mahal. Though there has been a slight decline in number of tourists visiting the palace, the annual footfall in 2012-13 was 30,00,452 as against 35,20,112 in 2011-12. According to the statistics provided by the Mysore Palace Board, 90,000 foreign tourists visited the palace in 2011-12 (from April to April) and it has reduced to 80,835 in 2012-13.

The Palace Board ascribes the dip in visitors to lack of air connectivity and also to the Cauvery agitation. However, the statistics show that tourist inflow keeps varying every month but it is at the peak during Dassara and vacations.

The main entrance to the palace is through the tall and imposing East Gate. Tourists enter the palace from this point. Gujaratis form the bulk of the domestic visitors while Europeans – especially the French, Germans and Britons – form the bulk of the foreign visitors. For the foreign visitors, Mysore apart from Srirangapatna form a part of their tour.

The tourist inflow to Mysore has been on the rise since 2009 and the first decrease in the numbers was registered in 2012-13.

In 2006, the Archaeological Survey of India records indicate that  25,25,687 people visited the palace as against 25,39,471 tourists visiting the Taj Mahal.

Although the Taj Mahal noses ahead of Mysore palace in terms of number of tourists visiting them, the actual number of tourists visiting the palace could be higher than the official figures collected from the ticketing counters. There are thousands of people who prefer to view the palace and savour its beauty from  

the vast open grounds and the courtyard inside the fort. There is no entrance fee for this and these numbers are not counted.

The official figure on the number of tourists takes into account only those who buy a ticket to gain entry inside the Durbar Hall and the Kalyana Mantapa. Thus if the combined figures of the ticketed tourists and those who enter the main gate but not the Durbar Hall were counted, the number of tourists visiting the Palace would far outnumber those visiting the Taj Mahal.

It was only from the beginning of this century that there had been an increase in the number of tourists coming to Mysore and visiting the palace. The upward trend can be gauged by the comparative figures for previous years. While 18,04,488 tourists visited the palace in 1999, the numbers have been steadily increasing since 2000 except for 2002 when it plummeted to 14,19,466. This was when Mysore and surrounding areas were hit by a severe drought. But since 2003, the figures increased from 16.45 lakh to 18.31 lakh in 2004 and 20.62 lakh in 2005.

The number of visitors to other monuments in India as per the records of the Union Ministry of Tourism and Culture are: Qutub Minar (21.95 lakh), Red Fort in Delhi (21.01lakh), Agra Fort (12.74 lakh) and Fatehpur Sikri (3.92 lakh).