26/08/2019 - Indian Economy | Mainstorming

IAS Parliament 5 years

KEY POINTS

India offers an infinite variety that no other country can offer facets that the Incredible India campaign captures so well.

Nothing reflects this better than a trip to the country’s most visited monument, the Taj Mahal. It is located in one of India’s most grungy cities.

Initiatives to boost tourism

· Extension of e- visa facility to citizens of 167 countries.

· Launch of the Incredible India 2.0 campaign with market specific promotional plans and content creation.

· Revamping of Incredible India website with the aim to provide more information about India as a tourist destination.

· Launch of 24x7 toll free multi-lingual tourist helpline in 12 International languages including Hindi and English.

· Organisation of biennial International Buddhist Conclave.

Challenges

· A visit to the monument involves negotiating long queues and surly, unhelpful staff.

· There are no controls on the number of people allowed in, so that burgeoning unruly crowds in the manicured lawns vitiate the quality of the visit.

· The entire experience is a marked contrast to a visit to the Great Wall of China, which received 10 million visitors last year against the Taj Mahal’s 8 million.

· Though road and train links to the Taj have improved as has hotel accommodation in Agra, this cannot be said of most other places in India.

· The Northeast, for instance, with its unparalleled biodiversity and tribal culture, remains mostly inaccessible by any transport link.

· According to the tourism ministry data, India has just 1,800-odd hotels/guest establishments offering 90,000 rooms; the bulk of them are in the five-star category, outside the reach of most domestic travellers.

· Air travel is expensive and travelling by train and bus involves an exercise in suppressing all sensory perceptions.

· Security, political and personal, is the other dimension of the problem. Political turmoil keeps tourists away from such destinations as Jammu & Kashmir and the Northeast.

· Domestic tourism, which the data from the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) shows.

· It puts India second only to China as the world’s fastest-growing outbound tourism market. Some 50 million Indians are expected to travel abroad in 2020.