Mumbai: The Indian government move to extend e-visas for nearly 150 countries to boost the in-bound arrivals indeed worked, but statistics show that the earnings from tourism fell sharply last year.
According to Tourism Ministry data, tourist arrivals in the country increased 4.55% to 8.03 million in 2015 whereas earnings fell 2.8% to $19.6 billion. In 2014, however, both tourist arrivals and foreign exchange earnings had increased 10.2% and 9.7%, respectively.
In November 2014, the government extended e-visas for 43 countries and in February next year widened it to 150 countries. Although the number of visitors using this facility grew 11-fold to 445,300, they still reputed for only 5.5% of the total arrivals.
Experts say that in past 3 years, the arrival of foreign tourist to India grew at a very slow pace. Even the foreign currency has immersed as e-visas failed to attract visitors in large numbers. Also, economic slowdown in some countries like Russia, Germany etc trimmed foreign travel. The US, Bangladesh, the UK and Sri Lanka accounted for more than 40% of tourist arrivals in India in 2014.
According to them, there are always some technical and payment gateway-related issues on e-visa website which often results in delay in the process.
"The needle on tourism has not moved at all. After the launch of e-visa, we should have had a marketing blitzkrieg across all overseas markets and coupled that with 'Make in India' and other initiatives like ease of doing business, etc. But somehow we weren't able to link the tourism bandwagon to both these things," said Kapil Chopra, chairperson of the World Travel & Tourism Council, India Initiative (WTTCII), told Economic Times.
One of the other reasons for slowing growth in tourist arrivals is the lack of efforts by the government to promote India in overseas markets.
"Out of the 14 tourist offices that India has in different regions across the globe, 12 don't have senior-level representatives or heads to actively promote the country," Sarabjit Singh, vice chairman of the Federation of Associations of Indian Tourism & Hospitality, told the daily.
Government had in December last year appointed PR in the UK and Japan, which experts say that the initiative should have started two years ago, when the Modi government took over.
The UN's World Tourism Organization had earlier reported that France topped the rankings of international destinations in 2014, with 84 million tourists and earnings of $55 billion, while the US was second with 75 million arrivals with $177 billion in earnings.
