States can’t tell tourists what to eat, drink: Kant

States should not decide what a tourist should eat or drink, NITI Aayog Chairman Amitabh Kant said on Friday at the World Economic Forum (WEF) event, amid growing prohibition on food and alcohol by state governments.

“Indian states can’t get into what a tourist wants to eat and drink. It is his individual business and not the states’ business,” Kant, also the driver of the Incredible India campaign, said at the India Economic Summit, organised in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry.

Speaking at the session on tourism, titled ‘Living up to the Incredible India’, Kant said that he has always communicated to the political leadership his views on the impact of prohibitions on tourists. “I have said it all the time that for a tourist, it is about creating experiences. In the evening he wants to relax and he wants to chill out and therefore you need to create that evening experience for (him) in terms of Indian culture.”

Kant was responding to the question whether states banning beef and alcohol had failed to realise that a country needs to extend to tourists every facility they need like Dubai has done.

“I have been a long-term believer in a couple of things. Tourism is essentially civilisational in character, you can’t have garbage and filth and say that we have great heritage sites. So, India must focus on cleanliness. It is number one. Number two, it’s about seamless experience,” he said.