Tourism Scenario in India – Some Revelations

In the previous blog I wrote about foreign tourists arrivals to india and some critical concerns about those. In this blog I have shown a more complete picture regarding Indian tourism scenario, including both domestic and international, and its spatial impolications. To make this blog more reader friendly I have given more visual impressions and tried to lessen the burden of text. The latest complete data available on Indian tourism is for the year 2012. Thus, the article talked about 2012 scenario only.

In Figure 1 exhibits number of domestic tourists, foreign tourists and total tourists travelled to different Indian states. If we look carefully at the graph, we find that:

1. Toruists visits are largely concentrated in a 5/6 states. These states are Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, karnataka and Tamil Nadu – the top 5 states in terms of total toruists arrivals.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of domestic tourists and total tourists in Indian states. As seen in previous figure, the share shows that about 65% of the total tourists travel to these 5 states. The top ranking state is Andhra Pradesh, which accounts for 20% of the tourists.

Figure 3 and 4 show share of total domestic tourists and total foreign tourists acorss Indian states. These two figures are kept side by side to compare these two parameters and suggest one of the most critical issue about Indian tourism. These two figures reveal that some of the states which are very important in terms of number of domestic toruists, are lesser important in terms of nuber of foreign tourists. Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu were the top 2 states. Andhra Pradesh accounts for only 1.41% of total foreign tourists travelled to India. A few other states important in terms of number of foreign tourists are Rajsathan, West Bengal, Bihar etc. which were at much lower ranks in terms of domestic tourism.

   

This is an important issue that needs to be probed in details. What is determining visits by foreign toruists but not by domestic tourists? Is it pilgrimage? Perhaps an analysis of domestic toruists data as published by NSSO will help in throw some light on this.The answer to this is important from the point of view of sustainable tourism in the country. We may get a clue in relation to positives and negatives of mass toruism versus selective toruism.