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Mountain Homestays conducts transformative tourism workshops for Bhil Community of Madhya Pradesh

25.03.2021

The Mountain Homestays team recently travelled to nine villages in Madhya Pradesh, India to conduct three-day workshops on homestay operations. Their objective was community empowerment and engagement that would lead farmers to gain an additional source of income from tourism.

After over a decade of working with communities in the Ladakh region on homestay tourism, Mountain Homestays decided to approach a different mountainous territory in Central India. Villages there mostly comprise the indigenous Bhil community that reside in the Jhabua, Dhar, and the Indore district of Madhya Pradesh, the biggest state in India, where the Aravali Ranges, Jhabua Hills, Satpura Hills and Vindhya Ranges converge.

The workshops were organized in partnership with the Madhya Pradesh Tourism Board (MPTB) and focused on how to set up authentic, quality homestays; standard operating procedures; COVID-19 protocol to operate homestays; and incoming management and financial planning. More than 380 villagers who practice agriculture as their primary occupation benefited from these trainings.

Mountain Homestay's team with the help of local NGOs mobilized the communities to gather for the workshops, which focused on how tourism can be a strong source of revenue along with agriculture. The training also highlighted that the Bhil community is rich in culture and has the potential to kick-start rural and community tourism as a feature of experiential travel - which is predicted to be the next trend in tourism after the pandemic.

The villages shortlisted in collaboration with MPTB and Mountain Homestays are situated in places where there has been an influx of tourists, yet the local people residing in these villages have not gained any direct benefit from it. They still rely on agriculture, which does not provide them with enough income to lead a good quality of life.

Each workshop ended with real calculations of the communties' current annual income and discussion on how they can improve. Men, women and youth enthusiastically participated in these three-day training sessions in all nine villages. The sessions were concluded with the strong message that everyone in the village is important to ensuring a safe and enriching experience for visitors. The shared responsibilities among villagers will generate improved livelihoods for everyone.

Gulsingh Dawar, a young villager of Undakho village in Dhar district expressed, "We have realized how tourism can give us employment staying in the village. Now we understand how each one of us can contribute to introducing our village to the world using our traditions and skills."

Providing these villages with the framework and foundation for strong rural and community-based tourism will help keep their traditions and way of life intact. Mountain Homestay's biggest take away from bringing the tourism training programme to the doorstep of the indigenous communities was that introducing new livelihood options with a high level of one-on-one engagement can motivate communities to fully participate in the sustainable development of their region.

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News and photo by Mountain Homestays