Tourism
Tourism refer to the trips that involve travelling of people outside the place of their residence or work for leisure, pleasure, vacation, business, personal, or other purposes.
Tourism is an important source of income for many countries. Nowadays, it is considered an industry.
Tourism is important for the growth and development of a developing country like India. The advantages and disadvantages of Tourism has been discussed in this article.
Advantages of Tourism
Now-a-days, tourism is the flourishing industry. The advantages of tourism includes employment opportunity, growth of service sector, foreign exchange earnings, opportunity for recreation, economic growth, cultural exchange, better international relations, enjoyment, better health and wellness.
- Employment: Tourism provides employment opportunity for local people. Tourism industry is growing very rapidly in India employing millions of people.
- Growth of Service Sector: Services sector engaged in tourism sector get the most out of tourism sector. A large number of businesses engaged in service sector such as airlines, hotel, surface transportation, etc. grows with the growth of tourism industry.
- Foreign Exchange earning: Many tourist destinations attract a good number of foreign tourists. This helps the country earn foreign exchange.
- Recreation: Travel based recreation provides relief from the monotony of daily routine. A change in place and climate helps a traveler to recharge his mind, body and spirit.
- Economic growth: Tourism helps in the development of economy of a country. It helps in the overall GDP development of a country. It helps the local people to earn their livelihood. The tourists spend lavishly during vacation. The local people engaged in assisting the tourists earn a good income.
- Meet new people: It helps the local people to get in touch with the people and country. It also helps building international relations.
- Cultural exchange: Tourism gives opportunity to people of various cultures to assimilate together. People belonging to various cultures meet together and understand each other. This gives them an opportunity to build respect for each other. Hence, it fosters cultural harmony.
- Health and wellness: Many people visit other places for the purpose of getting treatment for diseases, improving health and prevent diseases. This is called Medical and health tourism. Wellness tourism aim at achieving complete mental, psychological and physical well-being. There are many tourism destinations offering yoga, aerobics, and other therapies for improving health and wellness.
- Fun and enjoyment: Many people travel for fun and enjoyment. They simply do whatever excites them, or gives them enjoyment.
- Spend time with families: The life of modern people is hectic. They are too busy in their professional life. There is immense pressure even on children. Hence, such people plan for a holiday trip to spend quality time with their families.
Disadvantages of Tourism
The disadvantages of tourism includes increased expenditure, time-consuming, environmental hazards, loss of architecture and ecological balance, increase in waste products, damage to wild-life, and disruption in socio-economic and cultural setup.
- Tourism involves huge expenditure on part of the tourists. Travelling costs includes vehicle hire charges, hotel and resort rent, food cost, etc. This increases the overall spending of the person.
- You need to take out few days out of your busy schedule to visit tourist places. Hence, tourism is often time-consuming.
- Leisure trips are good for health, mind and body. However, hectic trips may cause stress and effect health.
- It may also lead to environmental hazards such as environmental pollution due to use of cigars, plastic bags.
- In order to attract more tourists and earn more profits sprawling resorts are built cutting down thousands of casuarinas trees beside sea beaches.
- These resorts destroy both scenic beauty of the place by paying no attention to local architecture and ecology.
- As a result of indiscriminate construction of high-rise buildings and infrastructure facilities, the provision of water supply and waste disposal facilities may get disrupted.
- Famous tourist spots attract an inflow of residing population. This may lead to an increase in demand for residential houses, roads, and food for permanent population. Under such situation, an increase in tourist activities beyond certain level may adversely affect the economy of the state.
- Overuse of natural wealth is a serious problem, tourist overuse of mountain trails resulting in abundance in dumping of waste products, food tins, etc.
- Damage to wildlife parks is a visible phenomenon. The ground vegetation may suffer due to the tourists’ shoes. Food habits of animal impaired.
- Due immense changes, pollution, and dirt, the landscape may lose its scenic beauty.
- Tourism may have damaging socio-cultural effects. Local people demean themselves to earn more or imitate alien culture, new lifestyles, foreign culture.
Solution
- Green Tourism: Tourism should be promoted with care. Once the natural beauty and human-made beauties are lost, tourism loses its charm and attraction and will collapse. The benefits of tourism will stay only if due care is taken for the longevity and survival of natural environment. So, today environment friendly or green tourism are being introduced by tourism industries.
- Avoid Ecological imbalance and health hazards: We should keep tourism within planned limits. Every care should be taken to avoid ecological imbalance and health hazards.
- Preserve local culture and tradition: Tourism must not play havoc with traditions and protected societies. New technique, high-teach communication may bring cultural setbacks, degradation to preserved communities.
Conclusion
Stability of nation is necessary for development of tourism industry. Political disturbances hamper tourism. India can reap benefits from this industry, can add to own coiffure, earn foreign money if tourists are attracted to Buddhist stupas, Hindu temples, Mughal, Rajput palaces, forts, and victory towers, rock-cut caves, elaborately laid our gardens.
Throughout our beautified country there are many thousands of attractions such as glaciers, snow capped peaks, lower hill stations, wild life sanctuaries, deep rain-forests, formidable desert in Rajasthan, sea beaches immense in number in east, west, southern parts.
Adventure sports i.e., trekking, skating, rafting in turbulent rivers, gliding, canoeing, mountaineering are other attractive attributes available here. Galore of cultural differences resultant in varieties of cuisines to please diverse tongues, textiles, artifacts, handicrafts pleasing eyes are other gifts.
Indian tourism is only a small portion of the world tourism industry. So, we must use all potentialities by proper planning, financing acquiring experience, packaging marketing, and boosting creativity, make outstanding appeal to travelers and seek help from private entrepreneurs.
