Conversation with Inir Pinheiro to understand the impact of COVID-19 on domestic alternate tourism

 

Conversation with Mr. Inir Pinheiro, founder of Grassroutes

Mr. Inir Pinheiro is the founder of Grassroutes, a social enterprise that works on the model of Community Based Tourism for over a decade now. The organization started its work from the villages of Maharashtra and now is spread in 16 districts across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The guiding principle that the organization follows is based on the idea that every village has something unique to offer given its story is shared properly.

Mr. Pinheiro’s views on how COVID-19 has impacted Grassroutes and the domestic tourism sector were sought over a tele-interview. He started by giving an overall picture of how the tourism industry has gained a phenomenal growth over the past few years. He says that globally, one in every 10 jobs is in the tourism industry and in the past 5 years, every fifth job created is in the hospitality sector.

Working with about 700-800 rural families and training them to have hospitality enterprises, Inir says that their main clientele is the domestic urban population who in the recent years have been more interested in off-beat rural tourism. Therefore, with not many international clients visiting the community based rural tourism destinations, Grassroutes’s hospitality enterprises in the villages have received guests till first week of March. Following the advisory to the tour operators from the Ministry of Tourism to hault any tourism related activities and a conscious call of the organization to limit the exposure of the village communities to COVID-19, Grassroutes have totally shut down its operations in the hospitality vertical post mid-March.

Mr. Pinheiro thinks that it might be too early to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism sector fully. Grassroutes have sold 15000 bed nights in 2019-20  and to understand the exact loss of business, it might be interesting to compare this figure to the ongoing financial year’s figure. When asked about how the rural families who host the tourists have been impacted due to a shutdown of tourism activities, Mr. Pinheiro said that the hospitality enterprises are usually an augmenting income source for the families, most of their primary income source being agriculture or migratory labour. He says that the village communities are more resilient to any such pandemics as they grow food locally and thus are self-sufficient. Therefore, families with agricultural land might not be affected due to a hault in tourism activities. However, it would be interesting to see how the families whose major source of income was migratory labour are coping with the situation given that both their primary and supplementary income sources have been stopped. As far the information received by the frontline workers of Grassroutes, these families are somehow managing to survive but a more detailed study to understand how would be carried on after the national lockdown by their team.

Presently, the team is expanding its marketing strategy and reaching out to more organizations that can help them reach out to more clients or help to replicate the model of Community Based Tourism (CBT) in different parts of the country.

Finally, when asked how he sees the pandemic impacting the domestic tourism industry as a whole, Inir was of the view that it might actually have a positive impact on sustainable off beat tourism. He says so as he thinks that after the emergency like situation is subsided and things start taking a regular shape, people would more likely avoid crowded tourism hotspots and would like to have an alternate tourism experience which would be more directed towards off-beat rural tourism.

-The interview was taken by Ms. Susmita Chatterjee, Project Manager of the Sustainable Tourism Project on April'20