Sustaining Livelihoods and Culture Through Tourism Development: The Case of Sriniketan in West Bengal, India

Sustaining Livelihoods and Culture Through Tourism Development: The Case of Sriniketan in West Bengal, India

Priyakrushna Mohanty, Rupa Sinha, Jyothi Kumar
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-9957-3.ch018
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Abstract

The rural area of Sriniketan in West Bengal, India is full of cultural embodiments that can not only serve as a base to develop tourism but also generate sustainable livelihoods. However, the Sriniketan region suffers from chronic poverty and its unique culture is getting depleted thanks to the lack of awareness and interest among locals. With the help of the DFID Sustainable Livelihood Framework (DFID-SLF), this study tries to analyse the contributions that culture-based tourism can make towards generating sustainable livelihoods at Sriniketan. A modified SLF has been prepared with an added element of cultural capital as a contribution to the existing livelihood literature and guiding sheet for future practitioners. Based on the primary (in-depth interviews of fifteen households and five key respondents) and secondary data collected, this paper concludes that tourism development in Sriniketan can not only aid its cultural preservation but also generate an alternate source of livelihood and thereby, making both (culture and livelihoods) sustainable
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2. The Sustainable Livelihood Approach

The concept of Sustainable Development (SD) made a grand entry into the development discourse with the Brundtland Commission Report framed in the year 1987 (Redclift, 2005) which defined SD as

“Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of “needs,” in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. (World Commission on Environment and Development [WCED], 1987, p.43).

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