EXPLORING THE UNEXPLORED PARADISE, TOURISM INDUSTRY IN NORTHEAST INDIAN STATES: PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMS

Abstract

Despite being endowed with huge untapped natural resources the North Eastern region of India for most of its post-independence history has been primarily perceived within security paradigms. This has resulted in major negligence of its development and self-sustainability while its economic potentials have remained unexploited. Consequently, the region is plagued with multiple issues of political instability, poverty, maladministration and is yet to gain freedom from wants, hunger, unemployment and exploitation. Thus, this paper argues for the need of an alternate model of development for the region interlinking purposes of ‘security’ and ‘development’. In this context the paper analyses the potentials and benefits of promoting tourism and argues that tourism can be an effective policy option to meet special development needs and to remove major sources of ‘unfreedom’ from human lives in the region, especially because of wide untapped comparative advantages in the sector and its inherent multiplier effect on development. Primarily a qualitative study, data was collected through interviewing key informants and from extensive literature review, which reveals that there is ample scope in the region to develop new tourism products (notably tea tourism, golf tourism, wild life/eco/ adventure tourism, cultural/pilgrim tourism, rural tourism, river cruise tourism, medical tourism, defence tourism & world war II Trail / circuits) not only regionally but also through a model of cross border tourism with Myanmar, taking advantages of shared ties and its geo political location to meet present economic and development challenges. As a key priority of the research is to provide recommendations, the paper suggests that Northeast should adopt an integrated regional tourism policy with core ideas of ‘sustainable tourism’ and ‘people’s participation’, the tourism development policy should necessarily be organized on a ‘developmental perspective’ rather than the present ‘attraction centric approach’, the policy should converge with Myanmar’s tourism policies to build on listed potentials among other recommendations to help in formulating suitable tourism policies for the region to bring much-needed development as is hoped for.