English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

Sustainable tourism and post-conflict state buildingclimbers. This trend enhances benefits from tourism related activitiesonly in limited urban places. It also employs urban and rural people inlimited extent as well. But the far western portion of Nepal still remainsa region yet unexplored by foreign tourists. It is also striking that eveninfrastructure and service quality in this triangular region is not that ofworld standard.The trend of tourism development in Nepal also shows that this sector isnot only confined in limited territory but also dominated by traditionalfeudal mercantile classes like Rana (ruling class) and Shah (ruling class) incollaboration with many Indian monopolistic capitalists (Bhattarai 2003;Bhattarai et al. 2005; Upadhayaya 2006). This is controlled and dominatedby a small number of urban based elite entrepreneurs at the central level.Aditya (2002) and Thapa (2008) reveal that the larger parts of the benefitsfrom tourism are claimed by outsiders and the upper elites in limitedspatial areas with high concentration and centralisations of tourismrelated activities. The local communities at large are left to face the costs,risks and hazards engendered by the unregulated form of tourism (Aditya2002). Nepal (2003) rightly observes that mountain tourism in Nepal islikely to cause the exploitation of natural resources mainly for the benefitsof outsiders if it is developed without local participation in the planning,control and decision making mechanism.Bhattarai (2003) links such a trend of tourism with the burgeoning subsectorof economy in Nepal. He also considers it as a medium of readyrealisation of the ruling classes of Nepal and not for the mass scale generalpeople residing in far flung rural areas. There is predominance of feudalisticapproach in tourism as like in other sectors of economy (Thapa 2008).The capital investment in hotels by territorial zones clearly shows thatKathmandu valley in central development region has 94.46 per cent sharesin total investments of Nepalese rupees 1060.846 million (approximatelyUS$ 15.15 million) in hotels in Nepal (Bhattarai 2003). Tourism sectorhas not been expanded and carried to additional untouched inaccessibledestinations in mid-western, far-western and eastern developmentregions which are exotic and enormous. For this reason, it will be wise toexpand tourism development efforts out of this triangle while upgradingservice standard in this existing triangular area at the same time.Decentralisation of tourism in Nepal is a new phenomenon which startedin 2001 through a pilot programme called Tourism for Rural PovertyAlleviation Programme (TRPAP) in six rural districts scattered throughoutthe country. It exercised bottom-up participatory planning process96