In the Himalayan region, one phrase is resonating from almost all the conferences about environment – enough is enough.One of the outcomes of this urgent call for action is that a renewed discussion is happening on how much can the Himalayan ecosystem hold and carry. Even the apex court has been intermittently dealing with this issue by taking suo motu cognisance and also while hearing various petitions. Let me approach it from the wider issue of people, nature and the what needs to be done to properly address the issue of environmental degradation in the Himalayan towns.The Supreme Court is now looking at a question Himalayan towns have been asking for years: how much can our mountains bear? “Carrying capacity” sounds like a technical term, but the idea is simple. Every place has limits. A spring gives only so much water. A slope holds only so many buildings. A town can take only so many vehicles and visitors, before life becomes hard for those who live there.Here, one should not miss mentioning that according to the Shimla police, nearly 15 lakh vehicles entered Shimla town in a period of 45 days during the summer tourist season .I have written to the court on this. My submission is that carrying capacity cannot be left to experts alone. It must involve the people, the elected municipalities, the gram sabhas and the local bodies. Let me explain why, as I would to someone hearing about it for the first time.First, why it matters. The Himalaya is young, steep and fragile. Every monsoon now brings its own list of landslides, broken roads and ruined homes. We have been going ahead with constructions with the assumption that the mountain has no limit. It does. A carrying-capacity assessment is a way of finding that limit before the mountain shows it to us the hard way. That is why the court’s attention is a welcome step, but a serious debate on this is long overdue.Who decides what happens to the land?Also, it needs to be kept in mind that the issue can be a double-edged weapon. Historically, the far right has shown its capacity to weaponise environmentalism into ecofascism. Imagine an expert committee, sitting far from the town, declares that an area cannot take more construction. It may be scientifically right. But then who decides what happens to the land?What do the owners get? What happens to the shopkeeper, the homestay owner, the labourers who earn their livelihood from tourism? If nobody answers, a rule meant to protect the mountain becomes another way of controlling the people who live in towns built on it. The fear is that the small and the powerless will feel the limit first, even as large projects will continue to find a way around it.So, where do we draw a line? This does not mean it does not lead to the saying that every ecological limit should be put to a vote. A fragile slope does not become safe because most people want to build on it. A town cannot vote away the limits of its water. Those limits must be set by credible science. But what we do about them is a different matter. Who gets the water, what we build, what we give up, who is compensated: these are political choices, and they must be made democratically. Science draws the boundary. Democracy decides how we live inside it.This is where the 74th Constitutional Amendment comes in. It promised that elected municipalities would have real power over planning. Three decades later, that promise is mostly unkept. In many Himalayan towns, development authorities, parastatal agencies and special-purpose vehicles decide land use and infrastructure, while the elected council struggles with garbage and drains. We cannot fix this by adding another committee that begins in the state secretariat and ends in a report.Carrying-capacity studies must be done with the municipality and the ward committees. Where a town spills into villages, the gram sabha and the panchayat must be at the table. People should help frame the questions and examine the evidence. They should not be invited to a meeting after the decision is made.None of this is against experts. Scientists and planners should make our choices clearer and tell us what each one will cost.Mountain communities carry generations of knowledge about their springs, forests, grazing lands and how the land behaves through the seasons. It cannot replace a geological survey, but it should not be dismissed because it did not come from a laboratory. Kerala’s People’s Plan Campaign showed that technical knowledge and local priorities can work together.Then comes power. The right to decide means little without the power to act. A council cannot protect a spring if another agency controls the land above it. It cannot regulate building if approvals are given by somewhere else. It cannot enforce rules without staff, technical help and money. Consultation without authority is an empty promise.And then there is money, which is where good ideas quietly die. If a town is told to hold back tourism or construction, it often loses the very revenue it runs on. We cannot ask it to protect the ecology and leave it to bear the loss alone. The water, the forests and the stable slopes of the mountains serve people far beyond them.Ecological fiscal federalismThe state and Union governments should compensate Himalayan towns for protecting these assets, through predictable, formula-based transfers tied to ecological responsibility, not discretionary grants or short-term projects. I call this ecological fiscal federalism. The cost of protecting a shared inheritance should not fall mostly on those who live closest to it.Thus, the planning framework for the Himalayan towns must encompass the carrying capacity as a central element. But a framework is only a beginning. What carrying capacity means for a high-altitude cold desert is not what it means for a mid-hill town or a river valley. Soils, rainfall, water, seismic risk, settlement patterns and livelihoods all differ from region to region and state to state.A single formula sent from Delhi will not work. Each state and each region needs time, and a proper process with its own people, to build its own assessment. Where a decision affects several towns or a whole river basin, the states will also need to coordinate. Local democracy does not mean one town can ignore what it does to another.My plea to the court and to the government is that they should not let carrying capacity become a tool for teaching hill towns to accept limits handed down from above. Let it give them the knowledge, the authority and the money to decide their own future, within the limits of the mountain.Tikender Singh Panwar is former deputy mayor of Shimla. He worked on the Leh Vision document and has written vision documents for a dozen cities. Author of three books, he is an urban specialist working in the design of inclusive cities and a member of the Kerala Urban Commission.