Marketing Indian Tourism-1

Tourism can be a big potential for creating jobs especially for low skilled workers. It can be divided into several segments. Lot of efforts are made to boost it occasionally.

Though we have been able to achieve mild growth rate in tourism industry, but no effort is made to identify its true potential. We never knew about our potential of BPO-KPO, IT, ITes industry just 20-25 years ago.  This is just when significant majority of Indians are not part of it.

Same can happen for the tourism industry as well, if it marketed effectively in the scale of its potential.

So far, we focus mainly on leisure tourism. In this case too, we play with the psychology of foreign tourists by having dual, i.e. higher tariffs for outsiders.

Let us look a small effort to analyse the potential:

Tourism can be divided into several streams, e.g. Education tourism, Medical tourism, Business tourism, Entertainment tourism, leisure tourism.

Education Tourism:

World over, people from underdeveloped economies, even from India go to developed economies for higher studies. Students tend to stay for a period of minimum two-three years for studies. They spend and consume. Hence, create market for goods helping trade and industry, which in return create jobs. Since they are involved in higher studies, they are also involved in research work strengthening the technical edge of these countries.

After independence, we invested in creating institutes like IIT, IIM and most of the foreign exchange in India today is earned by the students from these institutions by way of remittance by NRIs or Service Exports like Software, BPO-KPO activities.

We should not consider the expenditure in building such institutes as dead cost. It is the investment for future. There is tough competition for admission in these institutes. We are unable to create the supply to meet the demand at all levels of education.

Our youth has to go to other countries for studying medical. Why we should not spend more on building more medical colleges.

Cannot we create enough institutes of higher learning, which just do not fill the demand for domestic students, but also attract students from other countries.

Cannot our society think of reversing the trend of exporting students to foreign countries, creating more educational institutions for attracting foreigners for study? These students will not bring foreign exchange by way of tuition fee, but also paying for accommodation, buying consumables and services. This will increase the demand of goods and services in country, which in itself will create more jobs.

More to follow.