Participation in tourism businesses for the local community often comes with various challenges. A better understanding of barriers to tourism development can help manage and smoothen community participation in tourism. Over the past two decades, an effort has been made to understand the barriers to tourism, but the perspective of first-generation community participation is not explored in the existing literature. The current study measures barriers to tourism participation through four parameters, i.e., sociocultural, infrastructural, operational, and personal barriers. The study examined the barriers of first-generation service providers from the rural tribal belt of Arunachal Pradesh, India. Data were collected using the purposive sampling technique from various tourism and allied services owned and managed by the local tribal community. The findings indicate that barriers related to the infrastructural support system are the dominant form of barriers. In contrast, the sociocultural factors do not act as a strong barrier among service providers. However, this report defers to other studies on tribal communities that indicate specific sociocultural barriers to participating in the tourism business. The study shows that willingness and conducive sociocultural aspects alone are not sufficient to lead a profitable tourism business. Furthermore, the study also recounts the importance of external intervention for macro-level planning in tourism infrastructure.

Homestay services are one of the booming concepts for local community participation in the tourism industry. Participation of women in community‐based tourism activities is getting attention from academic stakeholders, but the women in the homestay services section need special focus. Hence, this study explores the opinions of female homestay service providers about their experiences in running homestays. In this study, 62 women were interviewed in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, India. The study extracted women's perceptions of homestay service in tourism. A semi‐structured questionnaire, interviews and participant observations were used to collect primary data. Homestay service is found to be an ideal profession for married women as it gives them the opportunity to fulfil other family duties, though it is not a compulsion in all cases. Women were also found to feel a sense of recognition through such participation in tourism. Participating in homestay services was found to be a source of meeting peers, building social networks and a sense of exposure to the outside world. The findings of the study will be insightful for implementing schemes related to women's empowerment and rural development. These findings confirm the mass migration of the rural population towards metro cities can also be curved by engaging more people in tourism and allied businesses locally.

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Muria is an indigenous tribal community, living in southern Chhattisgarh. Due to an undeclared war between the Maoists and Salwa Judum they were forced to abandon their villages in a much-distressed condition, causing their socioeconomic conditions to be severely affected. The Murias moved out from their native location and settled in the forested areas in the adjacent districts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states. In these areas where they settled, the Murias did not have any rights over the resources such as land, forest and so on. The Murias being Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) had to cope with several challenges to earn the income to meet the basic needs of their families in the absence of livelihood choices. The current research article aims to articulate the challenges confronted by the Murias in the process of rebuilding their livelihoods.