Assessment of tourism carrying capacity for hazarduari palace museum in murshidabad municipal town, West Bengal

Tourism Carrying Capacity is the key issue in the discussion of sustainable tourism and thereby it is highly concerned with negative impact of tourism activity. Now-a-days many mathematical models have been developed to quantify the carrying capacity of various tourist destinations. Among the different historical tourist sites of West Bengal, Hazarduari Palace Museum of Murshidabad municipality is one of the archeological heritage sites, which exerts a pull on a gigantic number of tourists in peak months but in the other it is negligible. The present paper attempts to quantify the Physical Carrying Capacity (PCC) and Effective Real Carrying Capacity (ERCC) of this heritage site based on psychological measurement among 60 visitors and, thus, assess its status with reference to its underlying infrastructure and management initiatives. The resulted value of ERCC for Hazarduari is 85020 visitors/month. The tourist arrival reaches beyond the capability of this destination during the months of December and January, in this manner these two months face an unplanned mass tourism.