A study on the significance of sustainable tourism in Meghalaya
Student name: Mr Tulenam Laloo
Guide: Dr Chubamenla Jamir
Year of completion: 2016
Host Organisation: Meghalaya Basin Development Authority, Shillong
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Augustus Suting
Abstract: The significance of Sustainable Tourism is seen to be altered with its increasing dimension in policy discourse and global action. This is manifested through its recent inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals and the UN General Assembly Declaration to consign 2017 as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development. The research study is intended to understand the prospects of the tourism sector and its sustainability context specifically in Meghalaya, being an upcoming tourist destination in India’s North East. At the beginning, the study embodied the need to identify and discuss the various forms of tourism existing in the state. The background with which links into another aspect of the study, which is to entail the sustainability of these forms of tourism by looking into the nature of the levels of impacts. Tourist destinations of Marngar, Mawlyngot and Mawlynnong villages were used as field areas to undergo the study, using three main indicators- that of environmental, socio-cultural and economic.
The research resulted in many causal implications that followed the sustainability scoring, some of which included unmonitored density of visitors, unplanned accommodation and amenity facilities, lack of sufficient tourism knowledge, economic avidity. In other instances, integration of traditional livelihoods and harnessing local produce with that of tourism, have led to much sustainable tourism practices. Such consequences need to be met with utmost consideration, which surfaces the need to guide barefoot practitioners, with the most viable means. Since eco- tourism happens to be the pre- dominant form of tourism in Meghalaya, the paper concludes with a study of literature of guidelines and certain principles that may be encouraged for the communities while adopting eco- tourism as a livelihood activity and thus operate in the most sustainable manner.
Keywords: Tourism, development, Sustainable tourism, Meghalaya, ecotourism.
