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Journalism of Courage
The Tourism Ministry has slammed a World Economic Forum (WEF) report on global tourism competitiveness, which has ranked India 65 among 130 countries. “Growth of tourism in India has to be appreciated in its entirety, and a piecemeal analysis does not do justice either to the situation or to those drawing inferences from incorrect analysis,” said a statement from the ministry.
“Incredible India is not only attracting an increasingly large proportion of the world tourism market but also has been able to capture the high-end tourists who are spending longer duration in India,” it said. “This is evident from the UN WTO’s latest report which indicates that though countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore may be having larger number of foreign tourist arrivals, the foreign exchange earned per foreign tourist by India, which stood at $1920, was much higher than that of Indonesia ($905), Thailand ($830) and Singapore ($835) and Malaysia ($520),” it said.
WEF recently came out with its second Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report in which India’s rank has been unchanged from the last year. In its two reports, the WEF used different indicators for its ranking. “Surprisingly, the details of the methodology of the survey such as sample size, selection of the executives, are not given in the report,” the statement added, pointing out that other more credible reports had been consistently providing a more favourable picture of India.
Meanwhile, Tourism Minister Ambika Soni on Wednesday stressed on the need for a better inter-ministerial coordination for further promotion and growth of tourism in the country. Speaking at the first meeting of the reconstituted National Tourism Advisory Council, a think tank comprising experts from both the Government and industry, she said several tourism projects could not be put on the fasttrack as they were not getting priority from related ministries.
