Kerala   

Call for pro-poor tourism

Heritage sites provide potential to involve indigenous people in the tourism sector.

Tomke Lask

"The contacts I accessed through the Internet brought me to India, and Wayanad considering the interest it has earned as a highly marketable tourism spot with a sizable population of indigenous people," says Tomke Lask, Professor of Anthropology University of Liege, Belgium.

"I envisage a tourism that is pro-poor as opposed to what most countries, especially Third World nations, appear to have initiated. Such a policy would benefit indigenous people, besides protect the environment."

Ms. Lask, who is the Director of the Laboratory of Anthropology of Communication, Liege University, has worked extensively on the tourism policy among indigenous people of Brazil and Bolivia and has been involved in studies that focus on the impact of cultural tourism on urban resources and economies as part of a European project coordinated by the Liege University.

As Scientific Organiser of the UNESCO seminar on the Universal Declaration of Cultural Diversity, she has developed methods to measure the impact of tourism on quality of life.

Wayanad with its mixture of agriculture products and heritage sites such as Edakkal caves provides potential to involve indigenous people in the tourism sector.

The local self-government bodies too could play a positive role.

It could be more of the intangible heritage when local population is included without loss to the total ambience, says Ms. Lask who has spent a year in Vietnam studying the issue. An example of involving indigenous people is the Eco Museum concept at Halong, seacoast tourism site in Northern Vietnam, where traditional boats are maintained and local fisher folk who ply the boats benefit ultimately.

Local crafts

Training people in local crafts such as bamboo and ceramic work and providing them administrative skills is one way of promoting tourism to benefit indigenous people.

Ms. Laske says that tourism projects considered developmental programmes are imposed from above and are often not what the local people want, or benefit from. Change in the cultural landscape of a tourism centre can be disturbing to locals.

Maleeha Raghaviah

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Private unaided colleges allowed to conduct CET
PET Engineering College
Call for pro-poor tourism
Panchayat ventures into filmmaking
Rajnikanth fans start countdown
A bilingual journal for music
A machine to make chappati
Dam Safety Authority inspects Mullaperiyar
Briefly

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu