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`Relaxed visa regime will boost tourism'

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI MAY 27. Though the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) 2003 forecast has good news for India, the WTTC president, Jean-Claude Baumgarten, said today that the country would find a permanent berth for itself in the world tourism map if visa-on-arrival was introduced.

Announcing the WTTC forecast here, Mr. Baumgarten said that a relaxed visa regime, better air access and more airports were needed to catapult India into the group of countries that mattered as far as tourism was concerned. Acknowledging India's concerns vis-à-vis security, he said New Delhi had to decide whether a strict visa regime was an effective mechanism in screening arrivals.

The WTTC projections for India indicate a possible 7.9 per cent growth in tourism, which is marginally higher than the estimate for South Asia (7.3 per cent) and way above the world average of 2.2 per cent. Even in business travel, the estimates put India on top with 0.7 per cent growth, a shade better than the world average of 0.6 per cent. And within the region, India stands head and shoulders above the rest with business travel to South Asia slipping into negative.

According to the WTTC report, India's travel and tourism industry is expected to generate two per cent of the GDP and 11,093,100 jobs while the sector in general is expected to account for 4.8 per cent of the GDP and 23,839,800 jobs.

Welcoming the Government's initiatives vis-à-vis tourism, the secretary-general of WTTC (India Initiative), Yogesh Chandra, praised the speed with which the National Tourism Policy was drafted after the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, announced it in August 2001. For his part, Mr. Baumgarten said it was important to ensure that the policy did not become a victim of politics and change of government. Such support had to be sustained, he said.

As to whether the industry would be able to recover from the cumulative effect of the Iraq crisis and SARS, he said: "This industry is resilient. All it needs is a bit of peace". And he echoed the Tourism Ministry's view that the fall in international travel had acted as a boon for domestic tourism.

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