Impacts of Pilgrimage Tourism for Sustainable Tourism Development: Special Focus on Lumbini

Abstract

The history of modern tourism is not as old as pilgrimage tourism- the oldest concept or original art of traveling. Pilgrimage to the sacred and holy sites induced modern tourism. The origin and evolution of the tirtha yatra(pilgrimage) tradition of Hindus seems to be as old as their civilizationor perhaps older than that. Nepal has become a decent destination for pilgrimage tourism with her large number of Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimage sites, shrines and temples. However, the stakeholders were not able to address the importance of Lumbini and develop in a professional ways. Today, Lumbini can be considered as a synonym of world peace center and a top class pilgrimage destination in the world. Lumbini Master Plan was a very ambitious plan for the overall development of Lumbini. However, the incompletion of the plan on time has been a great problem to develop tourism in Lumbini. Tourist arrivals in Lumbini has been fluctuated and affected by several reasons. Mega events in Lumbini have been helping to attract more tourists and enhance the Lumbini's status in the international market. Majority of the tourist visit Lumbini in a group. However, usually larger group of tourists/pilgrims make very short visit in Lumbini when they come via India. They are same day visitors and if Nepal can stop them at least for one day, it will have great impact in economy and employment. Beside pilgrimage purpose, Lumbini can be the attractive destination for the extra- religious activities such as sightseeing, cultural, historical. Nepal's share was very negligible with(0.06%) in tourist arrival in the world total in 2010.It is crucial to obtain accurate estimates of the uncertainty surrounding monthly international tourist arrivals based on time series data. The data series were analyzed in terms of the number of tourist arrivals, the corresponding logarithms, annual differences and log-differences in this research. It was argued that the preferred series to model the monthly tourist arrivals was one which has a distribution closer to a normal distribution. The monthly tourist arrivals levels depictedvery high coefficient of variation (CV) for the 11 tourist source countries. Likewise, monthly tourist arrivals to Nepal showed very strong seasonal patterns. Estimates of the conditional mean for the GARCH(1, 1) model for the level, logarithm, annual difference and log difference were obtained through a modeling procedure in which only significant variables were included until a parsimonious specification is achieved. The ten years armed conflict of Nepal (1997-2006)made clear that the devastatingimpacts such as loss of lives,damage of infrastructure, loss of livelihoods and an uncertainfuture in Nepal.After 2006 movement and peace process also did not solve the problem of continuous instability, and poor security situation of the country which has been affecting tourism badly. 10 th national plan for tourism development had expected US $ 60 per touristper day income from tourists in 2006 where as the data shows US $ 55.0 per tourist per day in reality in 2006. The datashows that income per tourist per day is US$ 43.2, gross foreign currency earning in convertible currency is US$ 329.98 millions and length of stay is 12.67 days. Increase in per day income and length of stay can contribute significantly in economy and employment. This research demonstrates that Lumbini is the world top class destination, its development and sustainability can worth a lot economically for the country like Nepal. In a time of increasing competition and uncertainty in the tourism, stakeholders should explore many different avenues for sustainability within the sector.