Sustainability Analysis of Tourism in India

In the recent past, understanding and practice of sustainability in tourism are becoming increasingly important to both academicians and tourism planners. In the last two decades, the attainment of sustainable development and the protection of touristic assets have been at the forefront of central policy issues in global tourism development. In addition to social and economic impact of tourism, overuse of natural resources and climate change are leading to the importance of drive for sustainable tourism development. Consequently, there is a growing research interest in investigating the performance of countries, especially in terms of environmental efficiency. In this article, the authors have empirically explored socio-economic efficiency of the top ten performing countries and India. Their basic content is summarised, along with the major findings. In this way, both measurement of countries' performance and the nonparametric approach of DEA have been given deserved attention. Tourism benchmarking and the assessment of tourism management performances are a crucial and challenging task in the direction of evaluating tourism sustainability and reshaping tourism activities. The proposed efficiency assessment procedure is based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA is a methodology for evaluating the relative efficiency when facing multiple input and output. Although the methodology is extremely versatile, for the sake of exemplification, in this article it is applied to the evaluation and comparison of sustainable tourism management of India.