France, a country of 68 million people with approximately 640,000 square kilometres of territory, receives around 90 million international tourists per year, making it the most visited country on earth. India, a country of 1.4 billion people with 3.3 million square kilometres of territory, one of the most diverse civilisational histories in the world, an extraordinary range of landscapes from Himalayan peaks to tropical coastlines to desert to rainforest, and living cultural traditions found nowhere else, receives fewer than 20 million international tourists per year.
This is not a mystery to be explained by the superiority of French attractions. It is a policy failure to be addressed.
India has everything that great tourism destinations need: heritage, diversity, natural beauty, cuisine, culture, spirituality and people. What it has not had, consistently, is the seriousness of purpose about tourism that would translate these assets into the visitor numbers, employment and foreign exchange that they are capable of generating.
Tourism is not a frivolous sector. Done well, it is a job creator, a foreign exchange earner, a rural development tool and a force for the preservation of cultural and natural heritage. Countries that have invested seriously in tourism have transformed their economies. India has the raw material to do the same and has consistently underinvested in the infrastructure and governance that would actualise it.
The Numbers That Should Embarrass India
Compare India's tourism performance with a few peers. Thailand, a country of 70 million people, receives approximately 40 million international tourists per year in normal times, more than twice India's numbers. Thailand's GDP is less than a quarter of India's. It generates more tourism revenue per unit of economic size because it has invested in the visitor experience as a serious economic priority.
Spain, with a population of 47 million, receives over 80 million international tourists per year. Its tourism sector contributes more than 12 percent of GDP. Tourism is treated as a strategic national industry, with dedicated investment in infrastructure, safety, visitor experience quality, international marketing and ease of access.
Indonesia, with its combination of Bali, Komodo and a thousand other islands, receives approximately 15 million international visitors, a number that is growing rapidly because Indonesia has made strategic investments in tourism infrastructure and international connectivity.
India's international tourist arrivals, even before the disruption of the pandemic, were low relative to its potential. Its tourism sector contributes around five to six percent of GDP, a number that most analysts believe could double within a decade with appropriate investment and policy.
The barriers to that doubling are not mysterious. They are well identified, frequently discussed and insufficiently addressed.
The Visitor Experience Problem
The honest assessment of why many tourists, particularly those with options, choose other destinations over India is that the visitor experience in much of the country falls short of what those tourists have come to expect.
The problem is multi-layered. Cleanliness and sanitation at tourist sites is often inadequate. Many of India's most visited heritage sites, which should be its greatest selling points, are surrounded by neglected environs, inadequate facilities, persistent harassment by touts and vendors and poor signage and interpretation for international visitors.
Safety perceptions, particularly for female tourists, are a significant deterrent to the solo and small-group travel that is the fastest-growing segment of international tourism. India's international safety reputation for women is not entirely fair, but it is not entirely undeserved, and addressing it requires changes in both enforcement and culture that have been slow to materialise.
Connectivity within India remains a challenge for international visitors. While air connectivity between major cities has improved significantly, reaching many of India's most spectacular destinations, the remote areas, the coastal gems, the wildlife sanctuaries, the less-visited heritage sites, involves journeys that are long, uncomfortable and opaque to navigate for someone who doesn't speak the local language or know the system.
Digital infrastructure for tourism, including booking systems, information platforms, digital payment acceptance and English-language customer service, is good in large cities and the established tourist circuit and thin or absent everywhere else.
The visa system, while significantly improved in recent years with e-visa expansion, still involves friction that comparable competitor destinations have eliminated.
None of these problems is insurmountable. All of them require sustained attention and investment.
The Jobs Argument
Tourism's potential as a jobs engine is particularly important in the Indian context because of the nature of the jobs it creates.
Tourism employment is, by its nature, geographically distributed. Hotels, restaurants, guides, transport, handicrafts, local food production: all of these economic activities happen where tourists go, not where manufacturing clusters or technology parks are located. This means that tourism development can create economic activity in rural areas, in heritage towns, in coastal communities and in forest-edge villages that are not well positioned to attract other forms of investment.
Tourism jobs are also, importantly, accessible to workers without high levels of formal education. A hospitality career, a guiding career, a craft business, a food enterprise: all of these can be built on skills that can be developed with relatively short training periods. In a country with millions of young people entering the labour force each year and a skills gap that makes formal sector employment difficult for many of them, the training and employment potential of tourism is significant.
And tourism has strong multiplier effects. A tourist who spends money at a hotel generates employment not just in hospitality but in the food supply chain that feeds the hotel, the local craft market the tourist visits, the transport business that moves the tourist around, the cultural performances the tourist attends. The economic activity spreads.
The UNWTO estimates that tourism creates one direct job for every five to ten indirect jobs in the broader economy. In an economy of India's size with India's employment challenge, that multiplier is significant.
The Heritage Preservation Argument
One of the arguments for taking tourism seriously that is rarely made in India's economic policy discussions is the role that well-managed tourism plays in heritage conservation.
Heritage sites cost money to maintain. Archaeological Survey of India resources are perpetually inadequate for the scale of India's heritage. State-level archaeology departments are often even more constrained. The result is the visible deterioration of many of India's most important historical sites, inadequate protection from vandalism and encroachment, and the loss of irreplaceable cultural assets.
Well-managed tourism generates the revenue, through entry fees, associated commercial activity and political attention, that makes conservation economically viable. When a heritage site attracts substantial visitor numbers, it becomes economically and politically important to maintain it well. When a site is neglected and barely visited, it falls off the radar of both budget allocators and enforcement agencies.
Countries that have built serious tourism industries around their heritage, from Cambodia with Angkor Wat to Jordan with Petra to Peru with Machu Picchu, have invested in those sites as economic assets. The investment in visitor experience, in interpretation, in conservation and in management has been justified by the economic returns. India could make the same calculation for hundreds of its extraordinary heritage sites.
What Serious Tourism Policy Looks Like
India has a Ministry of Tourism. It has state tourism departments. It has marketing campaigns and slogans. What it has sometimes lacked is the kind of cross-government coordination, sustained investment and attention to execution that turning potential into performance requires.
Serious tourism policy would treat the visitor experience as an integrated product that spans multiple government departments, transport, security, sanitation, heritage management, forest management, local governance, all of which affect what a tourist actually experiences.
It would invest in destination management organisations for India's most important tourism destinations, with dedicated professional leadership, adequate budgets and accountability for visitor satisfaction outcomes.
It would take safety for all visitors, and particularly female visitors, with the seriousness it deserves: not just in policing presence but in changing the street-level culture of harassment that makes certain destinations and certain modes of travel feel unsafe.
It would invest seriously in tourism education and hospitality training, building the workforce quality that turns good infrastructure into good experiences. The gap between India's hospitality training capacity and the quality of trained workforce its tourism ambitions require is substantial.
It would develop the homestay, rural tourism and experiential travel segments that are growing fastest in global tourism demand, and in which India's cultural diversity gives it a significant advantage if that advantage is packaged and promoted intelligently.
And it would treat international marketing as a serious strategic function, not an afterthought, with budgets and creativity commensurate with the competition India faces from countries that promote themselves relentlessly and effectively.
The Destination India Decision
India's tourism potential has been described as enormous by almost every travel writer, international tourism expert and economic analyst who has examined it. The potential is not in question. What is in question is whether India will make the sustained policy and investment decisions that convert potential into performance.
This is not about making India something it isn't. It is about presenting what India is to the world in a way that is welcoming, functional, honest and competitive. It is about ensuring that the traveller who comes to see the Taj Mahal, or the backwaters of Kerala, or the temples of Khajuraho, or the wildlife of Kaziranga, has an experience that makes them want to come back and tell their friends.
The tourists who do come to India often become its most passionate advocates. The quality of India's civilisational richness, its sensory intensity, its spiritual depth and its human warmth are things that no marketing campaign can fully capture and no competing destination can fully replicate.
The problem is not what India has to offer. The problem is that too few people are experiencing it, because too many barriers stand between the potential visitor's interest and their actual arrival. Removing those barriers requires treating tourism not as a soft sector peripheral to serious economic policymaking, but as the serious, substantial, job-creating industry it can be.
India has been treating tourism casually for too long. The opportunity cost of that casual treatment, in jobs, in foreign exchange, in heritage preservation and in the soft power of being a country that people actually want to visit, is large and growing.
It is time to take tourism seriously.