A STUDY ON LOCAL FESTIVALS IN CONNECTION WITH TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN MAHARASHTRA

After pandemic tourism sector has experienced a great fall and tremendous loss of the sector has predicted. Till to date situation is not much promising and the sector will have to take much efforts to re-boost. Tourism word was introduced by many cultures in different ways. Past people generally used to move around for certain specific reason and one major reason was Local Festival. Local festivals being the base of tourism from ancient period. Generally married women used to move to their parent’s place with these festival reason. And from that time Local festivals got an important place in movement of man and material and ultimately became a new form of Tourism. Local Festivals were also the major reasons in Indian culture which have supported tourism from many years. Tourism was not leisure or a holiday trip, at that time people used to move around with certain reasons. One of those reason was “Local festivals.”. For that particular festival which seems to be happened ones a year generally, the whole family started moving from one place to another. It was a great change for them, it was a small trip or a family tour. Transport facilities were limited but still families loved to move for a change. There are many local festivals arranged and celebrated by people in the whole world. Some of them are very famous, and Tourism industry had taken all the advantage of those festivals like “Tomato Festival” in Italy, Shopping Festival in Dubai etc.. From the viewpoint of a foreign traveller, a word tantamount with India is ‘culture’. Many tours are arranged by taking this Festival as a base. If we go on searching, we could find many exciting and totally unknown festivals are there even in Maharashtra state. Looking out the data for the famous festivals and the tourism development in those areas, we could find that there is a vast scope for the development of Maharashtra tourism on the basis of these Local festivals. This research will find out the relationship of local festivals in tourism development as well as in employment generation at local level. After pandemic these festivals can also prove to be the easiest solution for bringing back tourism sector on the track for