As iconic cities tackle overtourism with travel restrictions, it is time for India to step up

Vijay Vilas Palace of Mandvi, Gujarat. (Photo: Gujarat Tourism)

In Barcelona, local residents have been protesting against overtourism by spraying tourists with water. Similar protests have been staged in other parts of Spain, such as Malaga and the Canary Islands. Protests have sprung up in Sicily, Italy; Santorini, Greece; Dubrovnik, Croatia; and Bali, Indonesia. The authorities have levied taxes on tourists to disincentivize the hordes of visitors to Venice and Mount Fuji in Japan.

New York, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Amsterdam, Penang, and Hawaii have imposed restrictions on Airbnb and similar short-stay arrangements outside hotels, jacking up the cost of short-duration stay. This is, in part, to protect the local hotel industry from competition, and, in part, to reduce the number of tourists descending on these towns and making rentals more expensive for local residents.

Opportunity for India to Make Tourism Gains

As many parts of the world turn their back on tourists and tourism, an opportunity opens up in India to embrace more tourists, tens of millions more of them, and generate diverse kinds of jobs in India in providing accommodation and food, in producing and selling things that tourists buy, in ferrying tourists around the country, in orgainising their visits to tourist attractions.

India gets around 18 million tourists to traipse across its vast expanse of nearly 3.3 million sq km, and interact with its 1.4 billion people. In contrast, Croatia, with a population as large as that of a minor suburb of Delhi or Mumbai, and an area that is less than 2 per cent of India’s, gets more than 21 million visitors (visitor numbers from Index Mundi). Even Saudi Arabia ranks higher than India in terms of visitor arrivals, thanks to the pilgrimage of Haj. India ranks 14^th in the world in terms of tourist numbers. France, the world leader in attracting tourists, gets 117 million visitors, six and a half times as many as those who come to India.

Clearly, India can do a whole lot more to attract a whole lot more tourists. Countries that beat India hollow in attracting tourists range, in size, from small towns in India to one of its 38 states and Union Territories. Whatever any country has to offer — balmy, palm-fringed beaches, ancient monuments and the visible spoor of history’s march over millennia, culinary delights, magnificent mountains, starry horizons encircling vast stretches of sand and emptiness, milling crowds and mind-numbing traffic, anthropological diversity, varied fauna and flora inside sanctuaries and outside them, sacred rivers, profane parrots, godmen and tourist-friendly but largely harmless impostors, yoga and ayurveda, dance, drama, dance-drama, and other, stylized classical performing arts, music -- classical, folk, filmy and fusion -- symbolic representations of the entirety of human theological conception, ranging from blood-thirsty deities, human organs of fertility and animal representations. to formless abstraction — India has something better.

Challenges for India

The challenge is twofold: external marketing, and internal capacity building.

The primary capacity to build is respect: women should be spared ogling, not just molestation. The colonial ideology that taught Indians to see Europeans as the master race and the rest as inferior beings must be eradicated. Without such cultural change, all other tourism promotion would be futile.

India’s existing tourist sites are groaning under the weight of domestic tourists and the few foreign ones that do make it to India. A village local government in Goa is already bridling at any additional influx of tourists. But India has vast untapped potential, to build new hill stations and roads leading up to them, in an environmentally sustainable fashion; to locate and spruce up thousands of items hiding in obscurity on the Archaeological Survey of India’s list of assets, while signposting their significance and creating high-quality audio-guides that suffice to inform the visitor; to develop new coastal and riverside facilities that should have come up long ago; to organize fairs and festivals spread across the year and India’s geography, to showcase arts and artistes; to institute food hygiene across the board; to educate resident Indians to treat tourists as they would treat visiting friends, instead of fawning on them, deriding their customs and clothes or preying on them; to accord the safety and security of visitors and residents the highest priority.

Need to Upgrade Tourism Marketing Plans

The Taj Mahal, the palaces and camel rides of Rajasthan, the backwaters of God’s own country — these form Indian tourism’s marketing mainstays. This is limiting and wholly devoid of imagination.

India must present itself to the world as an ancient civilization that celebrates its past while developing and enjoying its diversity of culture and racing to the frontiers of new human achievement. Every facet of its past, present and aspirations for the future hold out fascinating appeal to people elsewhere.

Descendants of colonial soldiers and officials, who want to experience the sites of their forebears’ dashing adventures, or visit the places where they were buried or memorialized, should not have to ask ChatGPT to chart an itinerary for them — tourist information should lend itself to such exploration. Temples of South India and Orissa are not just centres of Hindu piety but also architectural marvels that should be presented as such. The sculpted glories of Khajuraho and Konark, the churches of Kerala, with its Christian traditions that precede Rome’s, and liturgies in Levantine languages of Biblical times, the physical remains of the Budha’s lineage, the seventh century mosque in Kerala, the Hindu icons that served as the original inspiration for the idols preserved in Jakarta’s museum of national history — there is much in India that can draw in visitors of different persuasion. Iberian visitors could savour Pork Vindalo in Goa, Dutchmen could marvel at the Dutch Fort at Kochi, archaeology buffs could visit Indus Valley sites in Gujarat and Haryana, Economist podcasters who describe South Indian languages as dialects could learn about the classical lineage of Tamil, and the wondrous capacity of ancient Tamil hinterland to simultaneously nurture scholarship in and through two classical languages, Tamil and Sanskrit.

Aficionados of martial arts from around the world could see Kalarippayattu. Music lovers can explore India’s systems of classical music, and diversity of musical instruments. Philologists, folkorists, linguists and practitioners of semiotics can expand their intellectual horizons just by travelling across India, provided they are presented with popular, and easily accessible presentations of India’s linguistic heritage, including the world’s oldest collection of tales in Paisachi, the fore-runner of contemporary Bengali, India’s two great epics, and their translations and elaborations in different languages in different parts of the country.

Visitors from central Asia would be delighted to see the region’s architectural styles and building materials find true grandeur in India, and their cuisine evolve and absorb spices blended in novel ways to delight the palate unimagined back home.

The short point is that India’s tourism can be imagined around many different themes appealing differently to different audiences, and marketed accordingly.

Tourism is the world’s largest employer. It can generate employment for a lot of people in India, in very many different sectors, with the right set of policies to prepare the domestic population to receive tourists, and to promote India as a destination in different markets.