Community Based Tourism and Assessing its Impact on Entrepreneurship Development: A Case Study on Mawlynnong in Meghalaya

Abstract

With an ever-increasing stress of life in the modern times, the need of tourism for recreation has never been as cathartic as before. Apart from recreation, tourism has multiple benefits in terms of the environmental sustainability, economic growth, and the cultural exchange. These activities enable or forces the local institutional bodies to deal with the inflow of tourists, manage resources and extend support to the inhabitants to start entrepreneurial activities through tourism and its allied activities. The present article, studies the Community Based Tourism (CBT) endeavors carried out by different institutions, the impact of tourism infrastructure proximity on CBT, and the effect of development on vernacular architecture in the village of Mawlynnong, Meghalaya, India. Both primary and secondary methods were used for data collection. The primary data collection was carried through informal interviews, unstructured enquiries and direct observations. In primary data collection the snow-ball & purposive sampling method were chosen. Further case-lets were made for the objective. These case-lets gave an intimate insight into the lives of the residents of the village and helped in understanding their experiences with the tourism industry in Mawlynnong