Dr. Vinay Chauhan
Abstract
Tourism industry has attained prestigious position owing to its rapid and spectacular growth over the last few decades but ironically, with the rapid development of tourism all over the world; lots of the people and environmentalist are becoming more and more concerned about its impact on environment. PATA and WTO have devoted a full time conference at Bali in 1993, to discuss the relationship between tourism and environment. As a result many countries have enacted the laws relating to preservation of environment. India is one of such nations, which have enacted such legislation and has set up a separate Ministry of Environment and Forest to monitor the land use from the environmental perspective. Over the years, there has been a considerable growth in the field of environmental law. Environmental Tribunals, Green Benches and a National Environmental Appellate Authority have been constituted, while the mandatory Public Hearing is a new and welcome development. Moreover,, legislation can be one of the efficient control mechanism to maintain harmonious relationship between tourism and environment.
Therefore in this context, present study is an effort to study environment legislation vis-à-vis their importance and effectiveness in tourism development. In the study, both awareness and effectiveness has been found bellow the mid value (d=3), which indicates that both tourists and hosts are not aware of the various environment laws and even these laws are not effective in implementations. Therefore it is suggested that these is a need to make existing laws more effective together with enhancing the awareness regarding the importance and relationship between tourism and environment among the tourist as well as hosts.
Keywords: Environment, Legislation, Awareness and effectiveness.
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