Understanding Kashmir Valley Tourism - An Insight into its Major Trends, Prospects and Problems

The Valley of Kashmir, popularly known as “Paradise on Earth” holds a rich and diverse touristic potential that clearly depicts its immense prospects for the development of tourism. In this paper, not only those unmapped and unutilized prospects of tourism have been unveiled by the author but also the problems of unplanned and mismanaged tourism that have taken away the “Sheen” of Kashmir Valley tourism have been exposed and thus the possible regional as well as national policies for adopting measures to tackle them have been simultaneously recommended. This Study is based on the secondary data which has been collected from the Tourism Department of Jammu and Kashmir, Ministry of Tourism GOI and Economic Survey of Jammu and Kashmir and simple tabulation methods have been used for analysis purpose. In nutshell, it has been suggested that tourism in Kashmir Valley has undoubtedly been the victim of undulations right from the India's independence but mere willingness to develop Kashmir Valley tourism can't do the job. Thus, concrete positive steps on the part of everyone concerned, whether administrators, local communities, tour-operators and the policy makers are the need of the hour.