Creating more opportunities for all

latricia · Newbie Joined: Jul 13, 2009 Posts: 1 Location: cochin

To promote tourism in Kerala, an attempt is made to preserve and conserve the natural landscape by setting up national parks, natural reserves etc. The Silent Valley and the Western Ghats have been identified as natural reserves of bio-diversity and thus they have been preserved as such. Kerala tourism industry got a boost due to the importance given to the eco-tourism model.

It has been observed that the growth of tourism has led to the development of hill areas in India and particularly in states like Kerala with a vast mountainous region. Hill tourism is gathering momentum especially in states like Uttar Pradesh and Kerala. The enchanting beauty of the Himalayas, the snow capped mountains, the white silvery glaciers, the rushing rivers and rivulets, the blue sky kissing the mountains and the flora and fauna along the Himalayan shrines have inspired pilgrims, tourists, mountaineers, trekkers and wildlife enthusiasts in large numbers from time immemorial. The hill regions of Kerala also have a similar story to tell. The tourist traffic to the hill regions of Kerala and Uttar Pradesh is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.

The fast developing eco-tourism model in the hills of Munnar in Kerala and other hilly areas of Uttar Pradesh will provide a new source of livelihood for the people of this region and remove their poverty and economic backwardness. This is certainly a welcome change. In view of the fact that a large number of people are trying to emigrate from these areas due to their precarious standards of living and their obvious inability to compete with the people of favored and naturally endowed regions, the possibility of generating significant foreign exchange right in their backyard will certainly force such people to stay on in instead of migrating to the cities to earn more.

Many of the earlier steps to de-populate certain areas, initiated for the development of tourism in India is now done away with in favor of the sustainable tourism model. Actually, there is an urgent need for ‘territorial tourist planning’. It is necessary to plan further tourism development in the selected backward zones of the country and also in certain areas of Kerala in order to avoid excessive concentration of tourism infrastructures in the already ‘tourist-developed’ areas.