Climate change has an adverse impact on the different spheres of life. Among the different human activities, agriculture is most affected by climate change which has been established by various studies at global and regional levels. It imposes serious constraints on the crop production which leads to changes in cropping pattern in general and in mountainous regions of the world in particular. In this regard, the present study aims to analyse the impact of rainfall variability on crop productivity and changes in cropping pattern in the north-western Himalayas. Mann-Kendall and Sen slope analyses were done to detect the changing trends in rainfall, whereas correlation coefficient was used to analyse the influence of rainfall variability on crop yield and the changing cropping pattern. The results indicate that rainfall has shown a decreasing trend from last few decades and has led to changes in the crop yield/production and cropping pattern in the region. Further, it was observed that crops in the region have shown different associations with rainfall, and as a result, area under some crops has increased while under certain other crops it has witnessed a contraction.

The success of sustainable tourism is inter-woven with the participation of different stakeholders in general and communities in particular. Participation becomes more important in the mountain ecosystems with a fragile resource base and limited capacities of the local people to accommodate rapid changes. The fundamental focus of this work is to measure the attitude of local communities concerning sustainable tourism development and assess the reliability and validity of the SUS-TAS. The research objective required both quantitative and qualitative research strategies. A survey of households was carried out to gather information from respondents. Yamane’s formula was employed to select the sample size of respondents. Structured questionnaires were used to collect the data and SUS-TAS was applied to serve as a foundation for the analysis of local communities’ attitudes to sustainable tourism development. Delineation of dimensions of SUS-TAS was done by principal component analysis with a varimax rotation. Community members exhibited their agreement to six constructs of sustainable tourism development among seven. This study validates the sustainable tourism attitude scale as one of the premier tools for monitoring sustainable tourism development.

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The present article aims to analyse the impact of pilgrim tourism on bilateral relations and to identify the mediating effect of people-to-people contact. It further proposes to test the framework empirically in the neighbouring context of India and Nepal. To achieve the objective, random sampling is used, and 380 usable questionnaires are taken for testing the theoretical framework. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is used to assess the framework's fit and analyse the impact of pilgrim tourism on bilateral diplomatic relations while using people-to-people contact as a mediating variable. The study findings reveal that pilgrim tourism has a direct impact on improving the bilateral diplomatic relationship between India and Nepal. It also shows that people-to-people contact between India and Nepal acts as a mediating variable between pilgrim tourism and bilateral diplomacy. In a vast country like India, which shares a border with many nations, pilgrim tourism and people-to-people contact have great potential to remove barriers and increase bilateral treaties for better development of the nation. The present research developed a measurement instrument about bilateral relations from the stakeholder's perspective. It also proposed a structural model to elucidate the relationships between pilgrim tourism, people-to-people contact and bilateral diplomacy.