Tourism-led Poverty Alleviation in South Asia – An Analytical Rapportage

Presently, when the whole world is busy celebrating the technological advancements, accumulated wealth and gains from globalization along with industrialization, poverty continues to stand as a ubiquitous and prevalent predicament in South Asia which is home to a quarter of the world population and nearly one third of the poor people in the world. Albeit, there has been a sizable reduction in the poverty headcount ratio since 1990, about 256 million people remain in absolute poverty in this region. Inequality both in social (e.g. gender, social strata and standard of living) and economical (e.g. per head income, Gini index and wealth distribution) terms is adding fuel to fire. However, the region has shown tremendous progress in tourism thanks to its natural, man-made and cultural endowments. In this paper, the authors have argued that tourism has predominant predicaments to be the panacea for poverty in South Asia. Tourism-led poverty alleviation studies have mostly been carried out in South East Asian context and this paper can bridge this gap. Various initiatives, policies and measures aimed at poverty alleviation through tourism have been highlighted in this paper.