Rural tourism has a chance to tap the potential of India’s unique heritage through rural tourism development for inclusive growth and poverty reduction. Even rural tourism can be divided into three main components:
1.
Fair trade tourism is about ensuring that the people whose land, natural resources, labor, knowledge, and culture are used for tourism activities actually benefit from it.
2.
Community-based tourism is tourism in which local residents (often rural, poor, and economically marginalized) invite tourists to visit their communities with the provision of facilities and activities.
3.
Ecotourism is tourism that unites conservation, communities, and sustainable travel. It implies responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people
There is a need for comprehensive research in finding out suitable locations, ascertaining market size, tourist profile, perceptions, and expectations, demarcating roles and responsibilities among various stakeholders, creating common utilities like accommodation and food, provision and management of infrastructure, promotional plans, and more importantly about the role of local government and community for the operation of the rural tourism product. Rural tourism products will incorporate developmental aspects and a commercial tourism component to ensure long-term viability. The creation of tourism products needs patient capital, community cooperation, and efficient design.
A badly designed product is doomed to fail in spite of the good execution. Even the best-designed rural tourism product takes 3-5 years from incubation to full operation.
Shaam-E-Sarhad (Sunset at the Border) Village Resort,
Grassroutes, and
Culture Aangan has shown good examples of successful product development with a core focus on community consultation.
I will be using
Design Thinking Principles to example the approach for designing the product and as a precursor to design strategy. The Discovery of the design-thinking process relates to identifying the “job to be done”. These methods concentrate on examining what makes for a meaningful customer journey rather than on the collection and analysis of data. Customer research has been an impersonal exercise. The trouble is, this grounds people in the already articulated needs that the data reflects. They see the data through the lens of their own biases. And they don’t recognize needs people have not expressed.
1. Immersion: Instead of designing just for community problems, how could the innovation team design for their strengths and pleasures? This will lead to the creation of experience activities, leisure activities, sightseeing tours, and awareness generation aimed at enabling tourism to enjoy fuller and more pleasurable lives.
2. Sensemaking: Immersion in the user experiences provides huge raw data for deeper insights. We will be using a concept called - Gallery Walk. In it the core innovation team selects the most important data gathered during the discovery process and writes it down on large posters. Often these posters showcase individuals who have been interviewed, complete with their photos and quotations capturing their perspectives. The stakeholders then form small teams, and in a carefully orchestrated process, their Post-it observations are shared, combined, and sorted by theme into clusters that the group mines for insights.
3. Alignment: The final stage in the discovery process is a series of consultative workshops for discussions that ask in some form the question: If anything were possible, what job would the design do well? The focus on possibilities, rather than constraints must be discussed with the local community. The acceptance and aspirations of the community must be aligned by establishing a spirit of inquiry. This will make it easier for teams to reach a consensus throughout the innovation process. And down the road, when the portfolio of ideas is winnowed, agreement on the design criteria will give novel ideas a fighting chance against safer incremental ones.
4. Emergence: The first step here is to set up a dialogue about potential solutions, carefully planning who will participate, what challenges they will be given, and how the conversation will be structured. We have to understand that intervention alone wouldn’t work if the local population in the cluster didn’t have the time or ability to incorporate tourism culture and didn’t have orientation on the tourism circuit —something few families in the area enjoyed. Champions of change usually emerge from these kinds of conversations, which greatly improves the chances of successful implementation. (All too often, good ideas die on the vine in the absence of people with a personal commitment to making them happen.)
5. Articulation: At the end of the idea generation process, innovators will have a portfolio of well-thought-through, though possibly quite different, ideas. The assumptions underlying them will have been carefully vetted, and the conditions necessary for their success will be achievable. The ideas will also have the support of committed teams, who will be prepared to take on the responsibility of bringing them to market.
6. Pre Experience: Design thinking calls for the creation of basic, low-cost artifacts that will capture the essential features of the proposed user experience. These are not literal prototypes—and they are often much rougher than the “minimum viable products” that lean start-ups test with customers. But what these artifacts lose in fidelity, they gain in flexibility, because they can easily be altered in response to what’s learned by exposing users to them. And their incompleteness invites interaction. Arranging prototype tours from the targeted segment are key to getting the right feedback.
7. Learning in Action: The feedback must acknowledge the concerns and engage in the co-design of an experiment testing that assumption. This is the last step to learning while in action. The learning helps in launching products on the scale, network tie-up (B2B or B2C), brand awareness, social media marketing, and community building.
(Inspired heavily by why design thinking works) and learned through major professional failure
Information itself is big business, after all this is the age of big data. I had written before on the topic in Job Search in Rural Management Domain. Due to the limited access to information and networks, youths from Tier 2 and 3 areas struggle to get good jobs in the development sector. Youths didn't know even the names of the organizations working in the ecosystem. It is best to choose target employers where one would like to work and focus your efforts on those jobs and employers while searching for jobs. This database is delivered as solutions to bridge recruitment gaps and tap non-profits, social enterprises, and other mission-driven organizations. With over INR 50,000 Crore was spent in 4 years alone in the CSR sector and huge public welfare implementation done by Government, there is an immense chance for jobs in diverse roles.
