Although blessed by a wide range of attractions, both manmade and natural, India has not been able to fully realise its tourism potential inherent in leisure, medical and religious traffic inflow.
Of course, India has transited to the cyber age in the cutting down of some of the cumbersome paperwork. While a recently launched electronic visa system for foreign tourists, expediting visa issuance, is a step in the right direction, there are other irritants that act as impediments.
'One of the major improvements is our e-visa system, which simplifies and expedites the issue of tourist visa for foreigners travelling to India. India has overhauled its visa system, making it possible to get a visa in the shortest span of time by eliminating unnecessary paperwork,' said Suman Billa, the joint secretary in the Indian Ministry of Tourism, who made a pitch at a recent road show in New York.
Indian travel agents and tour operators present at the roadshow in New York, however, privately told TTN that the Indian Government had been mulling the issue of a long-term multiple entry comprehensive visa by merging tourists, business, medical and conference visa into one to attract more visitors and boost trade and tourism.
India’s home ministry is said to be working on the proposal; the plan is part of the commerce ministry’s initiatives to boost India’s services trade. India is said to be missing out on a huge opportunity worth about $80 billion annually in terms of attracting foreigner tourists and foreign exchange.
Recognising the money-spinning potential of medical tourism – the medical tourism segment alone generates an estimated $3 billion and is projected to grow to $7-8 billion by 2020 – the Indian Government is aggressively promoting this segment. Foreign patients travelling to India for medical treatment in 2012, 2013 and 2014 stood at 171,021, 236,898, and 184,298, respectively. However, some experts say that smaller countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore attract higher number of tourist, including those coming for medical reasons, than India.
Nevertheless, the number of foreign tourists visiting India are expected to rise; during the January-September 2015 period, foreign exchange earnings rose to $19.7 billion, up from $15 billion in the year-earlier corresponding period.
The World Travel and Tourism Council forecasts that India’s tourism sector would grow at an annual growth rate of 7 per cent over the next ten years.
'Medical tourism is getting popular because of the low costs of treatment supported by first-class doctors and modern hospitals. Besides, there is hardly any waiting time involved,' Billa claimed. The government has set a target of 10 per cent growth of medical tourism for 2016, and is finally helping to promote the country as a destination for medical tourism.
Billa noted that India’s Tourism Ministry was partnering with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to stage the Global Travel Mart (GTM) in Delhi from February 1 to 4, 2017. The GTM will not only highlight India as a promising future destination but will also provide opportunities for partnership between Indian and foreign travel and tour operators. Billa said that the challenge lay in 'communicating about the wide range of products' that India offers, manifested in the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas, the beauty of Kashmir, the Golf courses in several cities, the monuments, temples and cultural and historic landmarks.
Another segment that is also being actively promoted is the religious tourism. As the birthplace of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, etc., India’s landscape is dotted with many sites that are revered by people outside India. To pay homage, many Asians such as Koreans, Japanese, Thai, Sri Lankans, Taiwanese, Indonesians, etc. visit the sites considered holy by Buddhists.
Billa also recognised the potential inherent in the financially-strong Indian diaspora in the US whom he urged to visit India along with their friends. 'If every Indian brought a friend from the US to India, we would have over three million more visitors,' he said. The Indian Government is trying to entice Persons of Indian Origin – PIOs, as they are called – to come to India by providing special visa and other facilities.
But a major deterrent for the leisure tourists is the hotel rates in India which are preposterously higher than hotels in other Asian destinations such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia where five-star rooms are offered at much lower rates. Explaining this conundrum, Billa told TTN that the high hotel room rates were due to the supply-and-demand situation in India, adding that hotel rates were 'stabilising' and that one could get good hotel accommodation at 'reasonable prices'. But, he admitted, that hotel rates tend to inflate because of the layers of taxes imposed at various state levels. The recently passed General Sales Tax in the Indian parliament should help standardise and reduce the hotel rates, he contended.
Nevertheless, US-based tour operators have been noticing the 'change for the better', as one put it, in the modernisation of India’s railway trains, inspired by Switzerland’s glass-ceiling trains. The Indian Railways plans to do a test run, effective December, of three luxury train coaches with glass ceilings – one on a route in the Kashmir Valley and the other two in the Araku Valley in southern India. As A.K. Manocha, the chairman and managing director of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corpn. (IRCTC) has been telling journalists, the coaches will be equipped with luxury chairs with extra leg space and state-of-the-art infotainment systems. Manocha said that trains with glass ceilings were operated in several Western countries such as Switzerland which attract tourists.
Having one of the world’s largest railway networks, with a whopping 23 million passengers being transported by rail each day, India has sorely felt the urgent need for modernisation of its railway which were badly neglected and hardly attracted any investment in the past. There were luxury trains such as the Maharaja Express or the Palace on Wheels which were used, mainly, by rich tourists, the average Indian travellers faced a period of gross neglect.
Notwithstanding the hiccups, India is expected to receive a record nine million foreign tourists this year, a 12 per cent increase over the eight million tourists in 2015. Vinod Zutshi, the secretary in the Ministry of Tourism, has been saying that the launch of the e-visa system has also contributed to this growth. The depreciation of the Indian rupee against major currencies has made travel to India attractive. 'The dollar goes a long way in India,' says Subhash Goel, a US based business analyst who studies the emerging markets.
According to Indian tourism ministry data, some 5.59 million tourists visited India in the first eight months of 2016, up 10.2 per cent over the year-earlier period. Tourist arrivals in the previous year’s corresponding period had grown by just 4.6 per cent.
In the current year, there has been double-digit growth both in the inbound and outbound travel from India. However, Zutshi says that India does not include non-resident Indians (NRIs) while counting foreign tourist arrivals. If NRIs were included in foreign tourist arrivals, the arrival figures would inflate by another 5.5 million, Zutshi contends.
The importance of tourism as a major source of foreign exchange earnings cannot be stressed enough. According to India’s tourism ministry, foreign exchange earnings from tourism jumped nearly 8 per cent to $14.92 billion in the first eight months of 2016. The US, Bangladesh and the UK are the top three source countries accounting for about 40 per cent of arrivals.
By Manik Mehta