Incredible India’s tourism target of 100 million visitors is credible if we try hard

The reality is that India probably has more to offer a tourist from abroad than almost any other country, thanks to its size, antiquity and sheer diversity of culture, including cuisine, and rich collection of monuments built in different centuries.

The big challenge is not the marketing of India’s tourist delights, but preparing people and the local infrastructure to make the visitor’s experience a matter of delight rather than regret.

This calls for challenging some deep-rooted cultural norms and stereotypes, as well as behavioural patterns, and that is far more demanding a task than constructing roads, places to stay, airports and civic amenities. But if India does manage to meet these challenges, the prize would be remarkable.

Such is the country’s tourism potential that we would not just gain a larger share of the world’s $1.5 trillion tourism receipts (2023 figure from UN Tourism), but also expand the global pie.

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Visiting tourists must be able to take safety and security for granted. That means law and order, first and foremost, but goes far beyond.

Cultural stereotypes must go that encourage a whole lot of Indian men to see women not just primarily as objects of desire, to be ogled, but also as prey if not with male company—and not for tourism’s sake alone.

Centuries of colonial rule by Europeans embedded race prejudices in the Indian psyche, leading many Indians to fawn on fair-skinned visitors while looking down on the rest. This is broadly inimical to India’s growth in a globalized world, and not just to the diversity of tourists drawn to India.

The sheer variety of taste and texture that Indian food can offer visitors is potentially a tourism force multiplier—provided it can be ingested without falling ill. That calls for a sea-change in hygiene levels that spans the entire range from raw ingredients, storage and transport to the dishes being served.

The safety of visitors also depends on general conditions in the country. Our road-fatality data, however, makes India an outlier on hazardous traffic. As with air pollution in the national capital region, this problem is proving inordinately obstinate.

Also, if a visitor needs medical help, the health facility she visits should offer more reassurance than horror. Communal flare-ups, of course, must vanish altogether.

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India has much to offer, from natural beauty, exotic flora, wildlife, adventure and blissful beaches to a living record of how spirituality evolved in different faiths over time; from our ancient and medieval history to architectural marvels from the past and present; from sculptures that combine the erotic and divine to the marvel of our anthropological variety; and from vestiges of various colonial regimes (French, Dutch, Portuguese and English) to assorted styles of music and dance, not to speak of Bollywood.

Giving foreign tourists the enriching experience they deserve would call for trained guides, audio resources, engaging websites and generalized hospitality services. All these can create jobs by the thousand at different skill levels. Indeed, tourism is the world’s largest employer as a sector.

Alas, India does not figure among the world’s ten most visited countries. This must change. The Centre aims to attract 100 million annual visitors by 2047, more than 10 times last year’s count. Achieving this would do us a world of good. Let’s make the effort.

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