Pro-Poor Tourism in India: Reality or Hyperbole!

Abstract

Tourism industry has been applauded for being the sunrise industry for its continuous growth and potential to alleviate poverty. India is a country with diverse untapped tourism resources and also, a country that has suffered from persistent poverty. Henceforth, the tourism sector can act as a panacea to the problem of poverty especially in a developing country like India. In the last two decades, a good number of tourism initiatives with a ‘Pro-poor approach’ are launched in India but there is hardly any study that has put light on the effectiveness of such initiatives or policies on the poor or how such tourism approach or strategy can be more effective in the Indian context. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to evaluate and envisage the various initiatives promoting Pro-poor Tourism in India since last two decades and to study the critical aspects of the Pro-poor tourism in India as a contribution to the existing literature. Designed with an exploratory approach this paper sheds light on various initiatives relating to the pro-poor tourism in India in last two decades. Data have been collected from reputed journals, Govt. Documents and Reports, Edited Books of both National and International Publishers. The study concludes that despite the massive potential of pro-poor tourism initiatives, the power of tourism to alleviate poverty in India have not been completely harnessed so far.