The Significance of Pilgrimage Tourism to Sustainable Development with Special Reference to the Indian Context

Pilgrimage tourism has gained significant popularity and attention in India due to its significant deliverables including employment, national integration as well as foreign exchange earnings. The investment of the government for developing the national infrastructure has been evident, however, the concern towards environmental impact due to pilgrimage tourism has not been explicitly considered. This generated the requirement of sustainable development for safeguarding the environment as well as man-made resources including sacred temples and shrines. The proposed study has analyzed the issues and challenges of pilgrimage tourism and offered significant solutions to attain sustainable measures towards negative impact mitigation in India. The research methodology used for the proposed study integrated an inductive design through the use of case study or journal analysis in order to attain qualitative data. The major gap that has been identified in the past studies is they primarily focused on the significance of sustainable development in tourism but did not focus on pilgrimage tourism which this study has significantly fulfilled. In addition, the information based on pilgrimage tourism is very limited in past research studies. The findings of the study revealed that increasing accommodation facilities, dumping of waste in water bodies and landfills are creating significant threats to the environment. Hence, it is recommended that both governmental bodies and local agencies must align their objectives to develop sustainable practices. In addition, sustainable policies and strategies must be developed which must be followed explicitly by each individual.