Problems and Prospects of Farm Tourism in Assam - A Case Study in the Muga Farm of Sualkuchi, the Silk Hub of Assam

Authors

Nihar Ranjan Kalita, Mr. Bhaskar Jyoti Thakuria

Abstract

Being agriculture dominated economy; the prospect of farm tourism is very wide in India. Unfortunately due to lack of proper knowledge about the concept, it has not got proper attention in our tourism planning. Farm tourism a branch of agriculture and rural tourism refers to the process of visiting a farm for a holiday, participating in its operations and learning about the agrarian society. This type of tour activity is highly beneficial for those farms that needs extra source to meet their running expenses.
In Assam, though other varieties of tourism concept are more or less introduced, farm tourism is still an untouched idea. To make the concept known to the policy maker, tour operator and other agencies, we have proposed a study on the topic titled –“Problem and Prospect of Farm Tourism in Assam- A case study in the Muga farm of Sualkuchi, the Silk Hub of Assam”. It is to be noted that, Sualkuchi, the silk village of Assam has a government sponsored Muga Farm with an area of about 1200 bighas of land in the northern hilly part of the village with sole objective to produce muga fibre. But due to lack of proper initiative and high running cost, the farm, though have high potentiality is being tagged as a sick one. On the other hand the number of tourist flow into the silk village has been increasing in the last five years for initiation of rural tourism by different govt. and non govt. agencies. Our proposed study would focus upon the issues related with farm tourism. We would study whether the concept can be introduced in the said Muga farm of Sualkuchi or not. The problems on synchronization of farm tourism with present tourism structure would also be highlighted. Though our study would be limited to Sualkuchi’s Muga Farm only, we would also try our level best to prescribe a macro view of the problem so all the farms of North- East get its fruitful result. The study would be done with a field survey in the farm and Government departments associated with the farm. Results of primary data will be blended with secondary information collected from various books, publications etc to make the analysis worthy.

Keywords

Tourism, Agriculture, Rural development

Problems and Prospects of Farm Tourism in Assam - A Case Study in the Muga Farm of Sualkuchi, the Silk Hub of Assam. Nihar Ranjan Kalita, Mr. Bhaskar Jyoti Thakuria. 2015. IJIRCT, Volume 1, Issue 3. Pages 361-371. https://www.ijirct.org/viewPaper.php?paperId=1503018