The Hindu : Priorities for southern tourism

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jun 09, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Priorities for southern tourism

THE DECISION TAKEN by the Tourism Ministers of the southern States at a meeting in Hyderabad to undertake joint promotion of tourism in the South and develop common circuits is a welcome, even if overdue, initiative. In fact, cooperation among the States in an area like tourism has a greater chance of success than, say, in matters of trade and investment, because in the latter case, the States tend to look at one another as competitors for mutually exclusive choices of location for the investor. Synchronised promotion of tourism in a contiguous region would, on the contrary, be an economically attractive option for the tourist without, at the same time, harming the aspiring host State's interests.

The southern Tourism Ministers' decisions, such as rationalisation of taxes and circuits, joint promotion abroad and request to the Centre to run a heritage train for the South and to allow more foreign airlines to land in southern airports are welcome as far as they go. But it would be more important for the southern tourism promotion authorities and policy-makers to understand the reasons for the present relatively undeveloped status of tourism and set right weaknesses before embarking on new plans and spending more money. The fact is that India, being a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic and variegated country, should be attracting more tourists from abroad as well as within the country than most countries known at present as popular tourist destinations, such as Singapore, Thailand, Switzerland or Hong Kong. But if this has not happened, it is at least partly because tourism has been conceived and promoted basically as a dollar-chasing activity rather than as a service industry that meets the needs of the tourist. The requirements of such an industry, in terms of infrastructure, trained manpower and facilitating institutional network, cannot be developed without understanding the consumer, and the best ground for this exercise is the Indian domestic consumer of tourism, ever eager to know his country and visit its vast geographic and cultural expanse but constrained by limited income. Since organised sectors of the industry have rarely looked at the domestic tourist, it has fallen behind in knowing how to develop a consumer orientation towards the much-sought-after foreign tourist in terms of competitive costs, quality of service and courtesy. (Even in merchandise trade, India has been competitive in the world market only in those sectors where it has had a huge domestic market and skill base, viz., textiles, leather and gems and jewellery).

Another factor behind the limited exploitation of the tourism potential of the country is the deterioration of macro-economic Central planning to the level of micro-planning, whereby even the building of toilet blocks in major tourist centres had to wait for Central Plan allocations, resulting in the sapping of local initiative and value systems. The southern tourism initiative should work towards overcoming the effect of such over centralisation. More than capital investment, mundane tasks like promoting civic sense and sanitary conditions within the local populace, lowering of costs through policies that encourage higher volumes rather than promoting tourism as a luxury choice, training of well-educated tourist guides with the right aptitude and language skills (both Indian and foreign), facilitating short-haul flights and helicopter taxis, encouraging travel writing in Indian languages, etc., need to be undertaken. A major neglected area that needs attention is heritage museums (as distinct from big anthropological museums established by the British) that celebrate India's sons and daughters in the fields of music, art, culture, science, polity and ideology, and thematic museums like science, technology, railways, posts, etc., with the cooperation of interested sections of civil society. Of course, a political environment conducive to social peace is a vital component of tourism promotion. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, put it aptly, when he told the 51st PATA (Pacific Asia Travel Association) Conference in New Delhi last year, "just as terrorism is a foe of tourism, tourism, in the broadest sweep of its effects, is an antidote to terrorism and extremism".

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