Title: Indian Tourism Industry: Trends and Growth in the Globalised Era
Abstract: India- a center for two primitive civilizations of the world -has long tradition of religious travel, which offers everything to everybody. Once it was called as the “brightest jewel” in the British Crown. India's tourism and hospitality industry provides and promotes almost all types of tourism under single umbrella, because, it possesses a host of diversified physiographic mosaic, consisting of cultural diversity with religious endower. For instance, the beautiful snow coated Himalayas are perfect for skating, hiking and trekking which became famous among the adventurous tourists; India’s temples, mosques, churches forts, palaces, sculptures, paintings, monuments and archaeological ruins are very popular among the heritage tourists; and wildlife, parks and sanctuaries are very well-received by the eco-tourists. Similarly, India is very rich in beaches and islands that attract the fascinating lovers of 4S such as Sand, Sun, Sea and Scenic. Added with, India is the unique nation that can claim uninterrupted existence and democracy and each State has its own cultural glory and historical monuments which attracted the attention of the foreign and domestic tourists. The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) notified that India is one of the fastest growing tourist economies in the world and thus tourism seems to be a major economic activity which produces economic, political, social, cultural, ecological and environmental consequences. Tourism has created employment opportunities both at the gross root and macro levels, starting from local community to tourism service providers and produced multiplier effects via forward and backward linkages in tourism economy of India. The performance of tourism industry in India has seen the light of progress in terms of tourism arrivals and tourism receipts during the globalised era, particularly after 1991. Tourism management experts opined that international tourist arrivals and tourism receipts are the two universally accepted yardsticks that has been used to measure the tourism index in any country or region. For instance, the international tourist arrivals to India grew by nearly 7.0 per cent in 2010 and 940 million international tourists arrived to India. Similarly, Indian tourism receipts have expanded to US$919.0 billion in 2010. Further, Government of India (GoI) is trying to create interest and awareness about the tourism destinations of different varieties in the overseas markets through its untired campaigns like “Incredible India”. Besides, Ministry of Tourism (MoT) is also equally making efforts to develop quality tourism infrastructure in different tourist destinations and tourism circuits. Since the introduction of Five year plan (1951), the GoI has been continuously taking sincere efforts in promoting tourism through different attractive tourism packages for the benefits of both domestic and foreign tourists. For instance, several committees and commissions have been appointed by the GOI and they recommended different viable and sustainable tourism policies for promotion of tourism in India. With these backdrop, the authors have made a sincere attempt to study the trends, growth and development of tourism in India during the globalised era by providing data support system, gathered and collected from the inter and intra national documents published by inter-intranational institutions.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-12-31
Language: en
Type: article
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