00:00 I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what can happen, what can't happen as far
00:09 as your own tourism business is concerned.
00:13 So let me sort of straight away push and move on.
00:18 For tourism, there are advantages and there are risks.
00:23 And while we celebrate and try and encourage all you homestay owners to start your businesses
00:30 and there are other homestay owners who have already started, as a community, so for me
00:36 this is not about tourism anymore, this is for as a community, you all need to be very
00:44 very aware of what are the advantages and what are the risks and we'll just go through
00:49 that now.
00:50 [Speaking in foreign language]
01:07 So I've listed here some of the advantages of tourism.
01:11 First of all there's a tremendous demand, especially to unexplored areas of India.
01:18 Thanks to COVID, India is benefiting.
01:22 Nobody wants to travel to, or a much lesser number of people want to travel to Switzerland
01:27 or America or Japan or anywhere.
01:30 They want to travel to India, they want to explore India.
01:33 So it is good for us in India.
01:37 Tourism as we all know, it supports activity, it supports employment, it supports income
01:43 and the culture exposes.
01:46 We need it to showcase our culture.
01:49 We saw a lot of it yesterday.
01:51 Now these are all the advantages of tourism.
01:53 [Speaking in foreign language]
02:13 Now there are risks to tourism also.
02:16 Not to take away from all the good things that tourism can do, there are risks.
02:20 And the risks are this, if tourism is unregulated, and I'm so happy that all the tourism officers
02:26 are here from Meghalaya Tourism and from the Gargoyles Union.
02:30 If tourism is unregulated, then that's a huge risk.
02:35 And as an organization from the GSTC, we have seen multiple times this happening over and
02:42 over and over again.
02:44 There's an unexplored part of the world, people go there, and because it supports so much
02:51 of economic activity, that unregulated tourism eventually destroys the place.
02:57 That's what I mean here.
02:58 Tourism, when it's unregulated, when it does not respect the culture of a place, it does
03:04 not respect the sense of space, the sense of place of the local people.
03:09 I'll give you some examples a little later.
03:12 That is a huge risk for tourism.
03:15 And that will definitely happen to Gargoyles, unless all of you in the community are very
03:26 aware of it, and the tourism officers support this, and ensure that Gargoyles does not become
03:35 like another Shimla, or another Kodaikanal, or a Mooti, where there are too many people.
03:42 And it's not the problem of too many people.
03:45 It is the people giving up their land and their sense of space for the sake of tourism
03:53 and money coming in.
03:54 That is a big risk.
03:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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