Tourism must engage with our rural roots

India celebrates National Tourism Day (NTD) on January 25 every year to highlight the importance of tourism to the country's economy, welfare, and prosperity.

- JEET DOGRA AND UTKARSH SHARAN

This year the theme is "Rural and Community Centered Tourism", but the question arises: why does a country with millions of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) every year need a day to celebrate its tourism industry separately from World Tourism Day, when the importance of tourism is acknowledged worldwide?

The devil lies in the details, as the saying goes. While India received approximately 7.7 million foreign visitors in 2020, the number sharply dropped by 85 per cent to 1.05 million FTAs in 2021 – a rather alarming drop, the restrictions in place owing to the Covid-19 pandemic notwithstanding. Conversely, domestic tourist visitations in 2021 numbered 677.63 million, a 11.05 per cent increase over the 610.22 million domestic visitors in 2020. The trend of domestic visitations far outweighing FTAs has been a constant observation since 1991, and as tourism continues to recover, this figure is expected to rise further.

The Taj Mahal continued to be the most visited attraction by domestic visitor volume, with Delhi’s Red Fort and Qutub Minar taking the second and the third places respectively. On the other hand, the group of monuments in Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu, received the largest volume of foreign visitors in 2021. Tamil Nadu did receive the maximum volume of domestic visitors that year at 17.02 per cent of their total number and was followed closely by Uttar Pradesh at 16.19 per cent.