The Dzumsa: how Lachen and Lachung govern themselves

At the centre is the Pipon, the headman. He is chosen by the village and is expected to know local custom well; accounts of Lachung say the Pipon is traditionally an older man, over about 45, chosen in December by the Tibetan calendar. He chairs meetings, represents the village to the government and, with the council, hears disputes over land, grazing, debts and family matters.

The Pipon is assisted by Gyapons, who act as messengers and village constables, calling people to meetings and seeing that decisions are carried out. Behind them stands the general body: the households of the village, which meet to discuss and decide matters together. Fines for breaking village rules are set and collected by the Dzumsa itself, and the money stays with the community.

Precise details, such as how long a Pipon serves, how many Gyapons are chosen and how votes are counted, differ between Lachen and Lachung and have changed over time. If you are curious, ask your host. Most families are glad to explain how their village works, and they will know better than any book.

The Dzumsa makes most sense when you remember how people lived here. The Lachungpas and Lachenpas are of Tibetan and Bhutia heritage, with their own dialects. Before 1950 Lachung was a trading post on routes between Sikkim and Tibet, and both valleys depended on trade, yak and sheep herding and a short farming season at around 2,700 m. Survival needed rules everyone accepted: when herds go up to the summer pastures, who cuts wood where, how much each household gives for a festival.

That job still falls to the Dzumsa. In Lachen it organises the seasonal movement of yak and sheep to grazing grounds around Thangu and the plateau beyond, and back down as snow returns. In Lachung it manages community forests below Yumthang, where villagers still take animals to the meadow in summer, a practice the Shingba Rhododendron Sanctuary allows. The council also coordinates village festivals at the Lachen and Lachung monasteries, founded in 1858 and 1880.

The Dzumsa is not a museum piece. In recent decades it has made decisions that shaped the villages, and some of them affect you as a traveller. The table lists the ones that are documented and checkable.

In 2006 a large hydropower project was proposed in the Lachung valley, one of dozens planned on the Teesta and its tributaries at the time. According to the research group Kalpavriksh, the Lachung Dzumsa discussed it at length and in 2009 decided to ban hydropower projects on its rivers outright, going so far as to make proposing a dam in public a breach of village rules.

The choice looked very different after the night of 4 October 2023, when South Lhonak glacial lake burst and the flood destroyed the 1,200 MW Teesta-III dam at Chungthang, just 21 km downstream from Lachung. Lower down, in Dzongu, young Lepchas had fought a similar fight with hunger strikes from 2007. The two campaigns were separate, but both show the same thing: in North Sikkim, local institutions have pushed back against projects they saw as a threat to their land.

Tourism has changed the valleys more than anything since the end of the Tibet trade. Over the past few decades it has grown into a main source of income, and today most families earn part of their income from hotels, homestays, vehicles or selling apples and snacks to the cars that arrive every afternoon in season. That brings money, but also traffic, waste, water shortages in peak weeks and pressure to build. The Dzumsa is the body that has to balance these things, and it does so with the same tools it used for pastures: meetings, shared rules and fines.

The long closures after the October 2023 flood tested that balance hard. With Lachen shut to tourists for most of three years and Lachung closed for months at a time by landslides, hotel owners, drivers and cooks lost most of their income. Villagers fell back on farming and herding, and on each other. When you visit now, you are helping a recovery, and families are frank about how hard those years were. Ask with care, listen more than you talk, and you will learn more about the Dzumsa in one evening than from any article.

By the 2000s plastic bottles were piling up along the road to Gurudongmar and around the sacred lake. In February 2012 the Lachen Dzumsa, working with WWF-India and the local tourism committee, announced a complete ban on the sale and use of packaged drinking water in Lachen and everywhere above it. Water filters were placed in hotels, homestays and tea stalls so visitors had an alternative, and the hotel association, drivers' union and police agreed to back the rule.

Sikkim later announced a state-level move away from packaged mineral water from 1 January 2022, but Lachen got there a decade earlier. For you, the practical result is simple: carry a refillable bottle and fill it at your hotel before the dawn drive to Gurudongmar.

You will rarely meet the Pipon, but you live under the Dzumsa's rules the moment you arrive. A few habits make you a welcome guest, and they cost nothing.

• Follow the water rule: no packaged water in Lachen and above; use the filters.
• Carry all your rubbish back to Gangtok, including wrappers from Yumthang and Gurudongmar.
• Give way to herds on the road, and do not chase or feed yaks for photographs.
• Ask before photographing people, homes and monasteries, and walk clockwise round chortens and prayer wheels.
• Do not bring party flags, banners or loudspeakers into the valleys.
• If a hotel or driver says the village has decided something, such as a road rule or a closing time, accept it; arguing with the Dzumsa's decisions gets nowhere.