Contextualising Tourism - Poverty Alleviation Linkages

Introduction Tourism is considered as one of the fascinating facets of the socio-economic development of modern times. It is about people, places, structures and interactions of varying nature and intensities that eventually contribute emergence of a diverse set of outcomes viz. economic, socio-cultural and environmental. Perhaps the reach and linkages of tourism is far wider and complex and that makes it a more powerful agent of change than most other forms of activities. This has been evident especially from the last two decades of 20 th century, where not just the individual nations became strong advocates of tourism but more importantly, the international institutions and protocols that took more proactive role on the cause of tourism. Multi-faceted impacts of tourism on various components of destinations are becoming growingly manifestive, and by now, its role in the socio-economic development has been explicitly acknowledged. In many ways, tourism has emerged to represent the modernised form of global movement of both people and financial resources and that the phenomenon of tourism is consistently demonstrating growth and expansion on a global scale. While there are variety of reasons and motivational dispositions that accelerate the process, what has come to be striking is the emergence of vacation travel as an integral part of the lifestyle of large sections of people. For this growing breed of lifestyle travellers, time and resources or destinations are less of a resistant; rather travel is the means to satisfy their neo-liberal habits and predispositions. Viewed from the economic perspective of poverty, imperative for development of tourism is very strong. The tourist numbers, both internal and international, are on the rise consistently despite occasional hiccups and the annual growth rate is much higher than the same for GDP. The direct and indirect economic impacts resulting from the burgeoning numbers are rather significant and that plays important role, especially in the developing world. For many of those countries, tourism is an important sector of the economy contributing substantially towards the critical needs viz. foreign exchange earnings, income and employment generation; eventually helping them to address their development needs including the issue of poverty. In this backdrop, this paper makes an attempt to elicit the complementarities of tourism to the cause of poverty eradication, one of the crucial challenges of the contemporary societies. It is based on secondary sources and efforts were mainly to highlight the working of tourism and its varied benefits to interline with poverty alleviation imperatives.