Community Based Tourism Development in Sikkim of India – A Study of Darap and Pastanga Villages

The Community Based Tourism Development is based on the engagement of local communities as the central stakeholder in tourism development. However, for most of the times, this concept of the bottom up planning is usually given in the top-down manner because of lack of awareness on the part of communities. The communities participated from planning to execution level are often catalyzed by external forces such as non-governmental organizations' encouragement to the local communities, and there has been little exploration of what communities think of their roles in tourism development. This paper studies this aspect in the Darap and Pastanga villages in Sikkim of India. The focus of the research is to understand the perspective of the local communities at a point when tourism has developed with the intervention of outside agencies that have involved locals in many roles.