Destination Development and its Social Impacts-A Case of Katra, Jammu

Tourism has been acknowledged as a powerful force for social well being, creating employment and wealth, and understanding of other cultures. There are many ways in which tourism has benefited a particular place, buildings or cultural activity. In Britain, many great buildings of the past would have been lost had there been no conversion into living museums for the tourist. Whole of inner cities and dockland areas have been restored and developed to make them attractive as tourist cities. With this backdrop, the objective of this study is to examine the social impacts of tourism in the study area i.e Katra. Both positive as well as negative social impacts of tourism development are been considered. The Present study is descriptive, evaluative and diagnostic in nature. It is descriptive as per the information collected about the resources of tourism. It is evaluative as per the evaluation of residents and entrepreneur's attitude towards the socio-cultural transformation. The study concluded that all the parameters relating to the socio-cultural impacts of tourism can be improved by the development strategies viz. capacity building programmes, educating the locals, making them feel pride in their culture, ensuring better host-guest understanding, reducing economic leakages, various training programmes, etc. And all these strategies further lead to the overall destination development thereby minimizing the negative impacts and maximizing the positive socio-cultural impacts of tourism.