Rituparna Chatterjee – Mumbai
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Arun Jaitley
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Arun Jaitley, union minister of finance and defence, Government of India during the recently held Indian Express Adda at The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai touched upon two significant industries that have been ignored – tourism and hospitality highlighting that the actual figures of foreign tourists visiting India is low and there is a need to concentrate on quality tourists rather than quantity. “When we say that the Indian tourism industry gets eight million tourists, that includes all the NRIs coming back to the country. So when we look at the actual number of real tourists, we need to filter that figure out,” opined Jaitley adding, “But can India compete with some of the most important tourism centric countries in the world? The answer is no. The room rates and taxes are high, there is double taxation. That’s an area where the government needs to looks into. India needs to take a decision – do we concentrate on volumes or on high-paying travellers. We should stop concentrating on mass volumes in tourism.”
During the event he informed the audience about the government’s capacity building strategy for transport aircraft. “With regard to our transport aircraft, in our last meeting we took a decision that only Indian governments can apply for the supply of a large number of transport aircraft and we didn’t allow the public sector to participate. So the idea is that people will enter into joint ventures and some private sector capacity building will take place in areas where our capacity is very low,” he mentioned.
He also touched upon the urgent need to improve hotel and tourism infrastructure. “Our tourism is at a very low rate. Therefore, one of the steps we have announced is e-visa and visa-on-arrival and the infrastructure for this has been set up at various airports in the country. But I think the approach will have to change. People come and visit our beaches, pilgrim centres, mountain resorts, heritage cities, monuments. We need to improve our infrastructure and most of these places may need to be improved upon. Fortunately, a number of them have improved in the last few years.”
