Tourism in India

Foreign tourist arrivals to India grew by about 4.5% from 6.3 million in 2011 to 6.57 million in 2012. While this is a sharp drop from the about 9% growth that was seen in 2011 as compared to 2010, it is still twice the world average, according to latest data from the Bureau of Immigration.

Incidentally, the US continued to be the top source country, touching 1 million tourists in 2012. In comparison, the number of tourists from the UK, Sri Lanka and Malaysia came down in 2012.

The top 10 source markets remained the same. The US and the UK were followed by Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and Malaysia.

The number of tourists from the US in 2012 was 1.03 million, up from 0.98 million in 2011, while visitors from Bangladesh increased from 0.46 million to 0.48 million. Travellers from the UK decreased marginally from 0.79 million to 0.78 million as did those from Sri Lanka, dropping from 0.3 million to 0.29 million in 2012. Malaysia ranked at 10 from last year’s eighth position and saw a drop from 0.20 million tourists to 0.19 million.

Tourists from Canada remained about the same at 0.25 million while tourists from Germany increased from 0.24 million to 0.25 million. France registered an increase with 0.24 million tourists in 2012 while Japan saw 0.22 million tourists from 0.19 million.

Despite the increase in foreign tourists, India’s share of international tourist arrivals continues to be about 0.64% in the world with smaller countries in Southeast Asia attracting far more visitors.

According to tourism ministry sources, recent changes in tourist visa rules, including lifting the mandatory two-month gap between consecutive visits to the country and allowing visa-on-arrival for group visas, are likely to boost growth that will only be reflected a year later.

The government has also recently reviewed the embarkation form and eased the process. Plans are afoot according to tourism minister K Chiranjeevi to liberalize the visa regime further. These include bringing in more countries under the visa-on-arrival scheme, incentives for those coming for medical treatment and concessions for senior citizens.

According to provisional statistics 6.29 million foreign tourists arrived in India in 2011, an increase of 8.9% from 5.78 million in 2010. This ranks India as the 38th country in the world in terms of foreign tourist arrivals. Domestic tourist visits to all states and Union Territories numbered 850.86 million. The majority of foreign tourists come from the United States (16%) and the United Kingdom (12,6%). In 2011 Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Delhi were the most popular states for foreign tourists. Domestic tourists visited the states Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu most frequently. Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Agra have been the four most visited cities of India by foreign tourists during the year 2011.

Worldwide, Chennai is ranked 41 by the number of foreign tourists, while Delhi is ranked at 50, Mumbai at 57 and Agra at 65.

Top 5 State/UT’s of India in number of tourist visits (2011)
#	Foreign Tourist Visits		Domestic Tourist Visits
1	Maharashtra	24.7%	Uttar Pradesh	18.3%
2	Tamil Nadu	17.3%	Andhra Pradesh	18.0%
3	Delhi	11.1%	Tamil Nadu	16.2%
4	Uttar Pradesh	9.7%	Karnataka	9.9%
5	Rajasthan	6.9%	Maharashtra	6.5%

The facilitation measure of issuing Visa On Arrival (VoA) to attract more foreign tourist to India, launched in January 2010 for the citizens of 5 countries, viz., Finland, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Singapore visiting India for tourism purposes, was further extended to the citizens of 6 more countries, namely, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines, Laos and Myanmar in January 2011.

Related links:-

UNESCO world heritage sites in India

India ranked 65th in tourism competitiveness

The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) 2013 of the World Economic Forum has ranked India 65th out of 140 countries covered in its study to rank countries on travel and tourism competitiveness. In the 2011 study, India's rank was 68, thus indicating an improvement by three places.

India is ranked 11th in the Asia-Pacific region. Among India's neighbours, Sri Lanka comes closest with the 74th place (rank in 2011 was 81) while Nepal (112), Pakistan (122) and Bangladesh (123) have a long way to catch up with their giant neighbour.

The study was based on 14 parameters. They are policy rules and regulations, environmental sustainability, safety and security, health and hygiene, prioritisation of travel and tourism, air transport infrastructure, ground transport infrastructure, tourism infrastructure, ICT infrastructure, price competitiveness in the T&T industry, human resources, affinity for travel and tourism, natural resources, and cultural resources.

The report mentions that "as with China, India is well assessed for its natural resources (ranked 9th) and cultural resources (24th), with many natural and cultural World Heritage sites, rich fauna, many fairs and exhibitions, and strong creative industries. India also has quite good air transport (ranked 39th), particularly given the country's stage of development, and reasonable ground transport infrastructure (ranked 42nd), although the quality of roads (85th) and of ports (79th) require further improvement. In addition, India remains a relatively price competitive destination (20th), even in the regional context. However, some aspects of its tourism infrastructure remain somewhat underdeveloped (ranked 95th), with very few hotel rooms per capita by international comparison and low ATM penetration. ICT infrastructure also remains somewhat underdeveloped and underexploited (111th). Another area of concern is the policy environment, which is ranked 125th because of the long time and high cost required to start a business, a restrictive visa policy (132nd), and low level of commitment in GATS agreements for tourism services (114th). Other areas requiring attention are health and hygiene standards (109th) and the country's human resources base (96th)."

Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Spain, UK, US, France, Canada, Sweden, Singapore took the first ten spots respectively.