Main Article Content
Abstract
The highly popular tourist destination Darjeeling, lovingly named the ‘Queen of Hills’, has been facing the menace of excessive and unrestricted tourism development due to massive tourist influx throughout the year. This has resulted in ecological degradation in terms of the proliferation of multistoried buildings, unchecked felling of trees, piles of garbage, increased road networks on wobbly hillsides, unbridled tinkering with the social structure of hilly ethnic communities, etc. Homestay-based tourism can offer a sustainable solution to the perils of overtourism in Darjeeling hills, not only by preaching and following responsible tourism practices but also by diverting a substantial portion of tourist inflow to various unexplored virgin areas of Darjeeling hills, thereby playing a balancing role among tourism, the environment and economic development of the local populace and the region altogether. The present study aims to address these concerns and propose effective suggestions and recommendations to meaningfully contribute to the sustainable socioeconomic growth of this region suffering from problems of unemployment, poverty, illiteracy and inadequate infrastructure through the effective utilization of the opportunity presented by homestay tourism, which makes use of the 4Rs of sustainable tourism, i.e., reduce, reuse, recycle and regulate. The study concludes that homestay tourism in Darjeeling hills still remains in its infancy in relation to sustainability endeavours.
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References
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References
Bhutia, S. (2014a); “Mountain People and their Response to Environment: A Study of Darjeeling Himalaya”, International Journal of Research in Social Sciences, Volume 4, Issue 2, 191-201.
Bhutia, S (2014b); Human Response on Socio-Economic Development in Darjeeling Himalaya of West Bengal”, Asian Academic Research Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 1, Issue 22, 166-173
Bryman, A. (2016), Social Research Methods, Oxford University Press, United Kingdom.
Banerjee, S. (2018). Sustainable Eco-Management: Participatory Mechanisms and Institutions. Economics, Management and Sustainability: Essays in Honor of Anup Sinha, 143-169. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1894-8_9
Cronin, L. (1990): A strategy for tourism and sustainable developments, World Leisure and Recreation, 32(3), 12-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10261133.1990.10559117
Harrington, E.C.Jr (1965). The desirability function, Industrial Quality Control, 21(10), 494-498.
Hall, C. M. (2010). Crisis events in tourism: Subjects of crisis in tourism. Current issues in Tourism, 13(5), 401-417. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2010.491900
Liu, H.; You, J.; You, X.; Shan, M. (2015). A novel approach for failure mode and effects analysis using combination weighting and fuzzy VIKOR method. Appl. Soft Comput, 28, 579–588. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2014.11.036
Lai, Z.; Ge, D.; Xia, H.; Yue, Y.; Wang, Z. (2020). Coupling coordination between environment, economy and tourism: A case study of China. PLoS ONE, 15, e0228426. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228426
Liu, K.; Qiao, Y.; Shi, T.; Zhou, Q. (2021). Study on Coupling Coordination and Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity between Economic Development and Ecological Environment of Cities along the Yellow River Basin. Environ. Sci. Pollut. 28, 6898–6912. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11051-0
Muhanna, E. (2006). Sustainable Tourism Development and Environmental Management for Developing Countries. Probl. Perspect. Manag., 4, 14–30.
Tang, Z. (2015). An integrated approach to evaluating the coupling coordination between tourism and the environment. Tourism Management. 46, 11–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.06.001
UNWTO—United Nations World Tourism Organization. (2003). Sustainable development of tourism: Concepts and definitions. World Tourism Organization.
Wang, M. (1999). A comprehensive analysis method on determining the coefficients in multi index evaluation. Syst. Eng, 17, 56–61.
Xu, D.; Hou, G. (2019). The spatiotemporal coupling characteristics of regional urbanization and its influencing factors: Taking the Yangtze River Delta as an example. Sustainability, 11, 822. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030822
Xia, X.; Lin, K.; Ding, Y.; Dong, X.; Sun, H.; Hu, B. (2020). Research on the coupling coordination relationships between urban function mixing degree and urbanization development level based on information Entropy. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 18, 242. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18010242
Yang, M.; Jiao, M.; Zhang, J. (2022). Coupling Coordination and Interactive Response Analysis of Ecological Environment and Urban Resilience in the Yangtze River Economic Belt. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 19, 11988. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191911988