Foreign arrival figures fox tourism industry
Official data shows India received 2.1 lakh foreign tourists in the nine-month period since the lockdown was imposed. Though this is less than 3 per cent of the arrivals in the year-ago period, the industry is still sceptical of the number presented by the government. The country hardly received tourists during the period and the industry assumes that the arrivals could have been for purposes other than tourism.
Between April and December this year,
2,13,853 foreigners had arrived in India. The arrivals had picked up from August when 11,619 people arrived. Since then, arrivals have been steadily growing, going up to 79,910 in December, minister of state for tourism Prahlad Singh Patel replied to a question on foreign tourist arrivals in Parliament.
Though the arrivals are
97.2 per cent less than the figure of 77,50,563 during the same period in 2019, the industry believes that these many foreigners would not have come into the country for travel and tourism.
"Except for the Vande Bharat Mission, flights were not operating normally all these months. Monuments and religious places were closed, transportation facilities were not properly available and hotels too were not functioning normally. I don't see any reason to think that these many foreign tourists arrived. Probably, these could be NRIs arriving for religious or family functions like weddings, or foreigners coming for medical or business purposes. Most of these purposes are combined under tourism arrivals," said Iqbal Mulla, chief consul, Global Tourism Council.
The government has also initiated a study to understand the job losses and economic losses of the sector. The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) was engaged by the government in January 2021 to conduct the study- "India and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Economic Losses for
Households Engaged Tourism and Policies Recovery".
"The closure of the travel and tourism industry has had a cascading effect on the livelihood of people dependent on tourism… Since the situation is still evolving, the final impact can only be ascertained in due course," the minister said.
The NCAER study will quantify sector-wise and overall loss in income of the economy and of the household sector and also the loss in jobs due to the impact of the pandemic on the tourism sector. It will also propose policy measures to provide relief to the tourism sector, in general, and households involved in tourism related activities, in particular, based on feedback received from various stakeholders.
"I am glad that the government has initiated an assessment of the industry situation. Whatever measures are being taken to mitigate the losses have to be done on a warfooting. Procedural delays have to be avoided,” said Mulla.