The Hindu : Nepal to woo more Indian tourists

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 21, 2002

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Nepal to woo more Indian tourists

By Our Special Correspondent

JAIPUR APRIL 20. The mountain kingdom of Nepal proposes to sell its holiday destinations to more Indians to make up for the fall in the arrivals of tourists from this country in the wake of the hijacking of the Indian plane from the Kathmandu airport in the past. A special 90-day festival titled "Festival of Life'', starting from May 1, is packaged to suit Indian tastes.

The festival, being revived after the bloody events, which led to a change of power in the Himalayan kingdom which threw a spanner on the tourism activities, coincides with the year-long golden jubilee celebrations of the conquest of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary in 1953.

Not surprisingly, the authorities in Nepal plan to open 103 Himalayan peaks for the mountaineers and invite Sir Hillary on the occasion. Fittingly for Nepal, the global bodies are also observing 2002 as the Year of the Mountain.

``As much as 32 per cent of the foreign tourists visiting Nepal are from India. Their number went down during the past two years but we expect to make up for it with the festival," noted Tek Bahadur Dangi, director of the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) talking to mediapersons here. "Indian people are at home in Nepal with the same cultural traditions, Hindu and Buddhist religions and the centuries-old political relationship between the countries," he pointed out.

India has been the prime target of all the promotional programmes of the Nepal Tourism Board had and justifiably so, when the number of Indians who visited Nepal in 1998 stood at 1.43 lakhs or 30.9 per cent of the total visitors. "Though we are targeting markets in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan and China, our focus is undoubtedly India," noted Pradeep Raj Pandey, CEO of NTB.

Both Mr. Dangi and Mr. Pandey were vehement in pointing out that the plane hijack affair was an aberration. "About 15 international airlines fly to Nepal these days and there is absolutely no need to fear for safety," Mr. Dangi asserted. The Maoist attacks as well as other hiccups in the past such as the controversy over the remarks of Hritik Roshan too should not deter the Indian tourists, they said. "Not a single tourist has been targeted in any of these incidents," they observed. More than the mere number of tourists, it was the spending of the average Indian reaching the Nepalese destinations which makes them a price catch.

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