State government sources here said the alternate route may be opened for routine traffic next week, earlier than scheduled. This could ease the supply position in the frontier region where stocks for winter are generally made during five summer months.

On Wednesday, first supplies of fresh vegetables were rushed to villages enroute to Kargil from Leh.

The state government Thursday launched a country-wide campaign to check adverse fallout of the Kargil encounter on the booming tourism in Kashmir. Senior Government officers today held press conferences in many parts of the country to dispel fears the Kargil incident was likely to generate about Kashmir.

Sources said the state government was gearing up for pre-empting the adverse fallout of the Kargil ontourism flow. Chief Minister Dr Farooq Abdullah Thursday requested Defence minister George Fernandes to lift the total ban on the operation of civilian flights from Srinagar. This, the government feels, had created panic among tourists and would eventually lead to major fall in the expected four to five lakh tourists expected to flow into Kashmir this summer.

At present the Srinagar airport has been taken over by the Indian Air Force to carry out the assault on insurgents' positions in Kargil. The state government has requested the Defence minister to at least permit a few civilian flights from and to Srinagar, to offset apprehensions among tourists and local population of a war.

Mohommad Ashraf, Director General, J&K Tourism said, ``Kashmir nearly looked normal with the presence of about 15,000 tourists today (Thursday)''. He said so far about 90,000 tourists had already visited the valley.

The Kargil skirmish has thrown a spanner in the tourism sector, which not only helped Kashmiris get out of theeconomic recession but also gave a semblance of normalcy to the Kashmir scenario.

However, the state government authorities confessed the Kargil incident would have an adverse impact on tourist flow to Ladakh region. ``We had worked out operation of about 14 flights per week to Leh to tide over an unprecedented rush of foreign tourists'', Ashraf said.