Status of mountain-tourism and research in the Indian Himalayan Region: a systematic review

The densely populated ecologically sensitive mountain region of the Himalayas under Asian developing country India, popularly regarded as Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), attracts millions of tourists and provides multiple ecosystem services. Yet, the progress and contribution of IHR in mountain-tourism remains relatively unknown due to a lack of integrated approaches. To understand the status and development of IHR-tourism and research and how they are interconnected, we employed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to extract relevant studies. Integration of quantitative and qualitative analyses successfully presented in-depth profiling of topical, thematic, methodological and bibliometric trends from 105 past studies. The findings show that uneven, centralized and unrestricted tourism development has already interrupted the human environmental balance in Western-IHR. Spatiotemporal research development reveals similar biases towards the Western-counterpart (81% studies; 51% in Uttarakhand). In comparison, similar possibilities of tourism-induced threats in the potential Eastern-counterpart remain completely unattended. Surprisingly, contemporary issues such as climate-change and water crisis are rarely linked with human induced issues of increasing population pressure. In addition, lack of multidisciplinary, impactful and advanced research practices restricts the exposure of the latest discoveries and facts on IHR-tourism. The contributions and shares of IHR in Asian tourism and the research domain are gradually falling behind similar mountain regions. Therefore, this SLR-investigation has raised important questions digging into existing research-gaps, highlighted the theoretical and managerial implications and directs the future pathways concerning the present state of relative underdevelopment in IHR. These finding also interconnect and contribute to multiple disciplines and international collaborations concerned with the sustainability of mountain-tourism.