Chapter 19: Tourism Industry
In the last week of May 2018, the hill town of Shimla — capital of Himachal Pradesh, high in the western Himalayas — was doing what it does every summer. It was filling up. Cars crawled up the mountain roads from the plains, hotels switched on their ‘No Vacancy’ boards, and the Mall Road thronged with visitors escaping the heat below. Then the taps ran dry.
Shimla had been built long ago for a far smaller number of people. Its water supply, drawn from a few ageing sources, thinned to a trickle just as the town swelled with tens of thousands of tourists. Residents queued through the night for a bucket. Some hotels struggled to serve their guests. And then something unusual happened: word went out across news channels and social media asking tourists to stay away until the crisis eased. The Himachal Pradesh High Court stepped in to watch over the supply.
For a town whose economy leans heavily on visitors, this was a strange message to send — please, not now, come back later. It exposed a tension that runs through this whole chapter. Tourism brings money, jobs and pride to a place. It also brings pressure — on water, on roads, on hillsides, on the very beauty that drew the crowds. Every tourist spot has a limit to how many feet it can hold. Shimla, that summer, found its own.
Diagram
Fig. 19.0-1 Caption: The same inflow of visitors builds a tourist economy and, at the same time, presses on the place that hosts it. Brief: Draw a central node labelled ‘Tourist attraction → visitor inflow’. From this node draw two arrows pointing outward. One arrow points up-right to a box titled ‘Benefits’ listing: jobs, local income, foreign exchange, demand for handicrafts, national integration. The other arrow points down-right to a box titled ‘Pressures’ listing: water shortage, waste and litter, unplanned construction, crowding, loss of charm. Both arrows originate at the inflow node and point away from it toward the two boxes. Keep it clean and symmetrical; no photographs.
19.1 The Meaning and Forms of Tourism
Before we can trace tourism across India, we need to be clear about what the word covers. Tourism is not only a holiday. It is an economic activity, an industry, and a movement of people at enormous scale. This section pins the term down and sorts the many kinds of travel it holds together.
19.1.1 Defining Tourism
Tourism is travel away from a person’s usual home and workplace, for a limited time, undertaken for leisure, pilgrimage, business, health or similar purposes — together with all the services that make such travel possible. A tourist, then, is someone who travels outside their usual environment and stays away for at least one night, but for less than a year, and not to take up paid work at the destination.
The phrase ‘usual environment’ does the real work in this definition. A person commuting to a nearby office each day is not a tourist, because the office lies inside their everyday world. Someone who travels to another state to see a temple, a hill or a relative, and stays the night, is. Distance alone does not settle it — leaving one’s routine world does.
Tourism produces no object you can hold. It sells experiences and services — a seat on a train, a night in a hotel, a guided walk, a meal. For this reason it belongs to the service, or tertiary, sector of the economy: the part that provides services rather than growing or making goods. It counts as an industry because it earns income, employs people and draws investment like any other.
Wherever an attraction draws visitors, a second economy grows up beside the ordinary local one — hotels, taxis, guides, shops, eateries and craftspeople who live off the visitor’s rupee. This tourist economy is why a single fort or beach can support a whole town.
19.1.2 Domestic and Foreign Tourism
Tourism is sorted first by where the traveller comes from. Domestic tourism is travel by residents within their own country — an Indian family touring Rajasthan, a group of pilgrims crossing several states to reach a shrine. International tourism, also called foreign tourism, is travel across national borders.
International tourism has two directions, and they matter very differently to a country. Inbound tourism is foreigners arriving in India; it earns the country foreign exchange, the currency of other nations that India needs to pay for imports. Outbound tourism is Indians travelling abroad; it spends foreign exchange rather than earning it.
In India the two are wildly unequal in size. In 2017, domestic tourist visits ran to about 1,650 million, while foreign tourist arrivals were only about 10 million. Divide one by the other:
\[\frac{1{,}650 \text{ million domestic visits}}{10 \text{ million foreign arrivals}} \approx 165\]
For every foreign arrival there were on the order of 165 domestic journeys. The two counts are not measured the same way — a domestic ‘visit’ is tallied each time a traveller enters a state, while a foreign ‘arrival’ is counted once at the border — so the ratio is rough. But a gap this large cannot be explained away by counting rules.
This is why domestic tourism is the backbone of the industry. It is far larger; it is steadier, since a war or an epidemic abroad barely dents it; and, by moving Indians through parts of their own country they would otherwise never see, it quietly strengthens national integration — the sense of belonging to one nation. Foreign tourism is smaller but prized, because it brings in scarce foreign exchange.
19.1.3 The Many Forms of Tourism
Travellers can also be sorted by why they travel, and India serves almost every motive. Most journeys are for leisure or pleasure — rest, scenery, a change of air. A great many are for pilgrimage, the oldest reason of all. Others travel for business, for health, or for adventure.
Business tourism covers travel for work — trade fairs, company meetings, conferences and exhibitions, often grouped under the label MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions). Business travellers spend heavily and frequently add a few days of sightseeing, which is why cities court them.
Medical tourism is travel across regions or borders to obtain healthcare — a surgery, a dental treatment, or a course of Ayurveda and wellness therapy. India draws such travellers because skilled treatment here costs a fraction of what it does in wealthier countries, and because its traditional systems of healing hold an appeal of their own.
Adventure tourism sends visitors trekking, rafting, skiing or climbing; cultural and heritage tourism draws them to monuments, festivals and crafts. Eco-tourism — responsible travel to natural areas that protects those areas and benefits the people who live in them — has grown important enough that this chapter returns to it in full later.
Flowchart
Fig. 19.1-1 Caption: Tourism sorted two ways — by where the traveller starts, and by why they travel. Nodes: Tourism → sorted two ways. Branch A, by origin → Domestic (travel within own country); International → inbound (foreigners into India) and outbound (Indians going abroad). Branch B, by purpose → leisure or pleasure; pilgrimage or religious; business (MICE); medical and wellness; adventure; cultural and heritage; eco-tourism.
Sorting travel this way is not just tidy bookkeeping. Each form makes different demands on a place — a pilgrimage town needs crowd management, a beach resort needs clean water, a business city needs conference halls — and a country that understands its mix of forms can plan for each.
19.2 The Growth of Tourism in India
Tourism in India is old as an activity but young as an industry. For most of history the great journeys were made for faith, not for pleasure; the idea of travelling simply to relax and see places is, for most families, only a few decades old. This section traces that shift, measures the three flows of travellers that make up Indian tourism today, and looks at the steps the government has taken to make those flows larger.
19.2.1 From Pilgrimage to Pleasure
The deepest root of Indian tourism is pilgrimage — the journey to a sacred place, or tirtha-yatra, undertaken for centuries. Long before anyone travelled for a holiday, people crossed the country to reach a temple, a shrine or a sacred river. Pilgrimage routes had rest-houses, guides and a rhythm of festivals, so the country already knew how to move and feed large numbers of travellers.
Because of this, India’s tourist map first grew around holy places rather than beaches or hills. That base still holds: pilgrimage draws enormous domestic crowds every year, and in recent decades foreign visitors too have begun to seek out these sites.
Over the last few decades the balance has tilted. Travelling for sheer pleasure offers far wider scope than any single shrine, and rising incomes and leisure have let more families choose it. Often the two are combined — a temple and a hill resort on the same trip.
Organised, planned promotion of tourism began in the 1950s, when the newly independent country started its Five Year Plans and treated tourism as an activity worth developing rather than leaving to chance. From that point the state began building hotels, marketing India abroad, and counting the travellers who came.
19.2.2 Tourist Flows: Arrivals, Earnings and Departures
A tourist flow is the movement of travellers between where they live and where they visit, measured as numbers of trips and the money that moves with them. Indian tourism is really three flows at once, and it helps to keep them apart.
The first is the inbound flow of foreign visitors. In 2017 the world as a whole recorded about 1.3 billion international tourist arrivals; of these, India received roughly 10 million. That is a small share for so large and varied a country — under one per cent of the world total — a puzzle this chapter returns to when it weighs India’s problems and prospects.
The second is the outbound flow — Indians travelling abroad. Here the numbers run the other way (Fig. 19.2-1). In 2017 India sent out about 24 million departures against the roughly 10 million foreign arrivals it received. India is, in short, a net sender of tourists: more of its people go abroad than foreigners come in.
Graph
Fig. 19.2-1 Caption: India sends abroad more than twice as many travellers as it receives, 2017. Brief: Simple vertical bar chart with two bars. X-axis: two categories, ‘Foreign arrivals (inbound)’ and ‘Indian departures (outbound)’. Y-axis: ‘Million trips, 2017’, scaled 0 to about 25. Bar heights: inbound about 10; outbound about 24. Label each bar with its value. Source: Ministry of Tourism, India Tourism Statistics, 2017.
Read the chart with care. It counts trips, not money and not people. An outbound trip may cost more or less than an inbound one, so a taller outbound bar does not by itself mean India loses more foreign exchange than it earns — that depends on spending, which the bars do not show.
The third and largest flow is domestic — Indians travelling within India. As you saw in the previous section, this dwarfs the other two, running to roughly 1.65 billion visits in 2017 and growing steadily year on year. In terms of where these travellers go, Tamil Nadu drew the most domestic visits in 2017, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra — a spread that mixes temple towns, historic cities and coasts.
Two things make the inbound flow economically weighty out of proportion to its size. Foreign visitors pay in foreign currency, and they tend to stay in India for relatively long trips compared with tourists in many other countries. Both raise the Foreign Exchange Earnings each arrival brings — which is why a flow of only ten million matters so much.
19.2.3 Government Initiatives to Boost Tourism
Because tourism earns foreign exchange and creates jobs, the government treats it as an industry to be actively promoted. The oldest instrument is the India Tourism Development Corporation, a public body set up in 1966 to build hotels and infrastructure where private investors would not.
More recent measures aim at a stubborn problem: seasonality, the tendency of visitors to crowd into a few months and leave hotels empty the rest of the year. To spread arrivals across the calendar, and to reach travellers with particular interests, several schemes have been launched.
Entry has been made easier. The Visa-on-Arrival facility, begun in 2010, and the e-Tourist Visa, launched in 2014, let visitors from a large and growing list of countries obtain a visa online or on landing rather than queuing at an embassy. The aim is simple — remove the first obstacle a foreign tourist meets.
Other schemes target the offer itself. The Niche Tourism Products drive promotes specialised forms — cruise, adventure, medical, wellness and others — in which India has some advantage, so that it can be sold as a destination for all twelve months. The Bed and Breakfast, or Homestay, scheme encourages families to host tourists in clean, affordable rooms, adding beds without building hotels. Swadeshi Darshan develops theme-based tourist circuits, while PRASAD, the pilgrimage rejuvenation drive, upgrades facilities at religious sites to serve the huge pilgrim crowds that first built Indian tourism. The main milestones can be set out on a short timeline (TL 19.1).
19.3 The Economic Role of Tourism
We call tourism an industry because it earns and it employs. But its economic weight is easy to misread, because a tourist does not leave behind a factory or a mine — only a trail of spending. This section follows that spending: how it multiplies through a local economy, how many jobs it supports, and why hotels sit at the centre of it all.
19.3.1 The Advantages of Tourism
Almost every advantage of tourism traces back to one thing — the money visitors bring and the way that money spreads once it is spent. Understanding the spreading is the key, so begin there.
When a tourist pays a hotel, that payment does not stop at the hotel. Part becomes wages for the staff; part buys food, laundry, transport and handicrafts from local suppliers. The staff and suppliers then spend their earnings in local shops, which pay still others. This ripple is the multiplier effect — the way a single rupee of tourist spending supports more than a rupee of activity as it passes from hand to hand (Fig. 19.3-1).
Flowchart
Fig. 19.3-1 Caption: One tourist’s spending ripples outward through a local economy — the multiplier effect. Nodes: Tourist spends at a hotel → splits into two: (a) wages paid to hotel staff and (b) payments to local suppliers of food, transport and handicrafts → both become income for local people → they spend that income in local shops and services → which supports further jobs and income → each round is smaller as money leaks out to imports and savings → the ripple fades into the wider local economy
From this ripple flow the main advantages. Inbound visitors pay in foreign currency, making tourism one of the country’s larger earners of foreign exchange. Their spending creates local income and jobs, discussed in the next two sections. It sustains local handicrafts and cultural activities — weavers, carvers, performers and craftspeople find a market in the visitor, which can revive skills that might otherwise fade.
There are social gains too. Domestic tourism supports national integration, as we have seen, while foreign tourism promotes international understanding between hosts and guests. Infrastructure built for visitors — roads, water supply, power, an airport — often serves residents as well, though, as later sections show, this is not guaranteed and can cut the other way.
19.3.2 Employment in Tourism
Tourism’s greatest social value in a country like India may be the sheer number of people it can put to work. It is a labour-intensive activity: serving travellers needs people — cooks, drivers, guides, cleaners, clerks, artisans — not machinery. For a given sum invested, tourism creates far more jobs than the same sum put into agriculture or manufacturing.
These jobs come in two layers. Direct employment is work in tourism itself — hotels, airlines, travel agencies, tour operators. Indirect employment is work in the activities that supply tourism — handicraft makers, food growers, transport operators and builders whose custom depends partly on the tourist. Counting both, tourism supports tens of millions of jobs in India, by some estimates close to a tenth of all the country’s employment.
Tourism also draws in workers whom other industries often overlook. It employs people of every skill level, from managers to porters, and it is a significant source of paid work for women — in hotels, airline services, travel agencies, handicraft making and cultural activities. This breadth is part of what makes tourism attractive as a route to employment, even as the seasonal and informal nature of many jobs remains a real weakness.
19.3.3 Hotel Accommodation
Hotels are the hinge of the whole industry. A tourist may come for a temple or a beach, but almost every rupee of foreign exchange the visitor spends passes, at some point, through a room and a meal. Realising this, the government has placed hotels and related activities in the priority category, offering tax benefits and easing foreign investment to encourage them.
To help travellers know what to expect, the Department of Tourism runs a star classification — grading working hotels from one star up to five-star deluxe by the range of facilities they offer. Alongside this sits a special category, the heritage hotels: palaces, havelis, forts and old residences built before 1950 and converted into hotels, with care taken to keep their original character. For a foreign visitor drawn to India’s past, a night in a converted palace is itself the attraction.
Yet accommodation is a fair measure of how far tourism’s supporting structure — its ‘level of development’ — still lags. Despite rapid hotel-building over recent decades, the supply of rooms has repeatedly fallen short of the rising inflow of tourists, and the gap is expected to widen unless building keeps pace. A shortage of good, affordable rooms is one of the quiet brakes on India’s tourist growth.
19.4 Places of Tourist Interest in India
India’s tourist places are too many to list, and a list would teach little anyway. What is worth learning is why the country’s attractions sit where they do. Two forces explain almost all of them. Physical geography — relief, climate, coast — creates the natural draws: the cool hills, the beaches, the forests full of animals. History and faith create the cultural draws: the temples, forts, palaces and sacred cities. This section moves across India’s four great physical divisions and reads each one for the kind of attraction it offers and the reason behind it.
19.4.1 The Himalayan Region
The Himalaya is today one of the leading tourist destinations in all of South Asia, and its pull is almost entirely physical. In a country that is hot for much of the year, height buys coolness. The mountains offer lofty peaks, snow, green valleys, fast rivers and varied wildlife — a landscape utterly unlike the plains most Indians live on.
The signature draw is the hill station — a town developed high in the mountains as a cool-climate retreat. Kashmir has Srinagar, Gulmarg and Pahalgam; Himachal Pradesh has Manali, Dalhousie, Dharamshala and Kullu; Uttarakhand has Mussoorie, Nainital and Almora; and further east lie Darjeeling and Kalimpong in West Bengal and Gangtok in Sikkim. The rare high-altitude meadow of the Valley of Flowers and the cold desert of Leh in Ladakh add landscapes found almost nowhere else in India.
The Himalaya is also a land of shrines, because Indians have long sought the divine in high, remote places. Uttarakhand holds the four great pilgrim sites of Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri, along with Haridwar and Rishikesh on the Ganga; Kashmir has the cave shrine of Amarnath and, near Katra, Vaishno Devi.
Where the mountains meet the plains, the forests teem with animals, and some of India’s finest parks lie here (Map 19.3). Corbett in Uttarakhand is the country’s oldest national park; far to the east, Kaziranga in Assam protects the one-horned rhinoceros in the flooded grasslands of the Brahmaputra, and neighbouring Manas guards a rich mix of species. The north-eastern hills add their own centres — Shillong, Kohima, Imphal and Aizawl among them.
Map
Map 19.3 Caption: India’s major wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, the natural draw for wildlife tourism. Brief: Political map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with no boundary shown as disputed; international boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Mark and label a representative set of parks and sanctuaries: Corbett, Kaziranga, Manas, Sundarbans, Gir, Bandipur, Nagarhole, Periyar, Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Ranthambhore, Sariska, Bharatpur (bird sanctuary), Simlipal. Use a legend distinguishing national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and bird sanctuaries; mark state capitals lightly for reference. Do not shade relief.
19.4.2 The Northern Plains
The great plains are flat and, in relief, monotonous — yet they hold the densest concentration of cultural tourism in India. The reason is history: the plains have been the heartland of empires and religions for thousands of years, and the Ganga made cities along its banks sacred. Here the draw is not scenery but stone — monuments, forts, and holy cities (Map 19.1).
The best-known circuit is the ‘Golden Triangle’ — Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Delhi, the capital, holds monuments of many eras; Agra holds the Taj Mahal, the single sight most foreign visitors will not leave India without seeing; and Jaipur opens the palaces and forts of Rajasthan. In the dry west of Rajasthan, the ‘desert triangle’ of Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Bikaner turns the Thar’s sand and forts into an attraction, with Pushkar and Ajmer close by.
Map
Map 19.1 Caption: India’s major monuments and holy places, the backbone of its cultural tourism. Brief: Political map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with no boundary shown as disputed; international boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Mark and label a representative set of monuments and holy places: Badrinath, Kedarnath, Amarnath, Vaishno Devi, Haridwar, Kurukshetra, Amritsar, Agra (Taj Mahal), Fatehpur Sikri, Mathura, Varanasi, Sarnath, Ayodhya, Bodh Gaya, Nalanda, Khajuraho, Sanchi, Ajmer, Pushkar, Chittorgarh, Dwarka, Somnath, Konark, Puri, Tirupati, Madurai, Rameswaram, Tiruchirappalli, Golconda, Mysuru. Use dots with labels; mark state capitals lightly for reference.
The plains are also India’s meeting ground of faiths. Uttar Pradesh holds the sacred Hindu cities of Varanasi, Mathura, Vrindavan, Ayodhya and Prayagraj, and, at Sarnath, an important Buddhist site; Bihar adds Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha found enlightenment, and the ruined university of Nalanda. Amritsar in Punjab is the seat of the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikhs. In the east, Kolkata anchors the region, and beyond it the Sundarbans — the world’s largest mangrove forest, shared with Bangladesh — shelter the Royal Bengal Tiger.
19.4.3 The Peninsular Plateau and the Coasts
South of the plains, the peninsular plateau and its two long coasts offer the widest mix of all — plateaus and hills, temples and forts, and above all beaches, the natural draw of a country with a very long coastline (Map 19.2).
The western coast is India’s beach country. Goa, tiny but famous, has more beaches than any state of its size, and tourism is a major pillar of its economy — its Portuguese churches and palm-fringed sands set it apart. Further south, Kerala pairs the beaches of Kovalam with its backwaters — the network of lagoons and canals at Alappuzha — and the tea-clad hill station of Munnar. Tamil Nadu answers with the great temple towns of Madurai, Thanjavur and Rameswaram, the hill stations of Ooty and Kodaikanal, and Chennai’s Marina beach; at Kanyakumari, the mainland ends where three seas meet.
Map
Map 19.2 Caption: India’s scenic places and beaches, from Himalayan hill stations to southern shores. Brief: Political map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with no boundary shown as disputed; international boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Mark and label a representative set of scenic places and beaches: hill stations — Srinagar, Gulmarg, Manali, Dalhousie, Mussoorie, Nainital, Darjeeling, Gangtok, Shillong, Mount Abu, Ooty, Kodaikanal, Munnar; scenic sites — Valley of Flowers, Jog Falls, Marble Rocks (Jabalpur); beaches — Calangute (Goa), Kovalam, Marina (Chennai), Puri, Gopalpur-on-Sea, Juhu; and Kanyakumari at the southern tip. Use a legend distinguishing scenic places and beaches; mark state capitals lightly for reference.
The plateau itself is dotted with cultural and natural landmarks. In Maharashtra, the rock-cut caves of Ajanta and Ellora were carved into the soft basalt of the Deccan Trap — the vast lava sheets that build the plateau, easy to cut and so ideal for such work — while Mumbai adds Elephanta and the pull of the commercial capital. Odisha holds the Sun Temple at Konark and the pilgrim city of Puri; Madhya Pradesh has Khajuraho and Sanchi; Karnataka has the ruins of Hampi and the gardens and palace of Mysore; Gujarat has the temples of Somnath and Dwarka and the Gir forest, the last home of the Asiatic lion; and Andhra Pradesh has the hill shrine of Tirupati, among the most visited in the world. Southern parks such as Bandipur, Nagarhole and Periyar complete the region’s wildlife offer.
19.4.4 The Islands
Off both coasts lie India’s two island groups, fast becoming attractions for their clear seas and untouched shores. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands sit in the Bay of Bengal, with tropical rainforest and beaches and Port Blair as their main centre. The Lakshadweep group lies in the Arabian Sea, small coral islands ringed by lagoons. Though both are ‘islands’, they were built in quite different ways.
19.5 The Impact of Tourism
So far tourism has looked mostly like a gift — foreign exchange, jobs, a market for crafts. But a gift on this scale always has two faces. The same flow of visitors that feeds a place can also strain it, and the strain falls hardest exactly where the attractions are most fragile. This section weighs both faces, first on the local economy and then on the environment, and it does so fairly — the point is not to praise or condemn tourism but to see clearly what it does.
19.5.1 Tourism and the Local Economy
At a tourist spot, the good that tourism does is real and close at hand. Visitors create jobs for local people — as guides, drivers, cooks and shopkeepers. They give craftspeople a market, which can revive skills that were dying for want of buyers. And the roads, power and water laid on for tourists often serve residents too. For a remote hill or coastal community with few other options, the tourist may be the best chance of paid work.
But the local gain is smaller, and shakier, than the visitor numbers suggest, for three reasons.
The first is leakage — the share of tourist spending that flows straight out of the local economy. When a resort is run by outside hotel chains and stocked with goods brought in from far away, much of what the tourist pays leaves at once for airlines, companies and suppliers elsewhere; only a thin slice stays with local people.
The second is seasonality. Tourism often crowds into a few months, so a town that is packed in season stands near-empty for the rest of the year. Incomes earned in the busy weeks must stretch across the empty ones, leaving workers insecure.
The third is dependence. A place that comes to rely on tourism alone grows fragile, because tourism is easily frightened away. A distant piece of bad news, a bandh (a strike or shutdown), an epidemic or an act of violence can empty a resort overnight, and the whole local economy suffers with it. Rising land and rents add a further sting — as a spot grows popular, prices climb, and long-time residents may find themselves priced out of their own town.
19.5.2 Tourism and the Environment
The environmental cost is where tourism’s second face shows most sharply. It arises from one simple fact: tourism gathers a great many people, for a short season, into places that are often small and delicate. A Himalayan hill town, a coral island, a desert oasis or a fragile riverbank was never built for the crowd that a good season now brings.
Every visitor needs water, a bed, transport and, at the end, produces waste. When thousands arrive at once, demand for water and land soars and rubbish piles up faster than the place can clear it. The result, at many popular spots, is water shortage in the peak months, unplanned building that scars the landscape, litter and sewage, and traffic where there was once quiet.
Behind this lies a key idea: carrying capacity — the largest number of visitors a place can hold without damage to its environment or to the visitor’s own experience. Cross that limit and the damage begins. A small hill station like Mount Abu, the only such town in Rajasthan and a busy pilgrim centre besides, feels this squeeze keenly, its slopes and water sources pressed by more visitors than the site was ever meant to carry.
The cruelty of it is that the damage undermines the very thing that drew the crowd (Fig. 19.5-1). Building and pollution spoil the views, foul the water and strip the greenery — and once the charm is gone, so is the reason to visit. Left unplanned, tourism can eat its own foundation.
Flowchart
Fig. 19.5-1 Caption: Left unmanaged, a tourist boom can destroy the very attraction that started it. Nodes: A place’s natural or cultural charm draws tourists → visitor numbers and spending rise → hotels, shops and roads are built and crowds swell → pressure on water, land and waste disposal grows → the environment degrades: water shortage, pollution, lost greenery, spoiled views → the charm that drew people fades → the destination loses its draw → back to the start, now with a weakened attraction and fewer of the visitors it once had
Whether a given place has crossed its limit is not always obvious, and people at the same spot often read it very differently.
None of this is an argument against tourism. It is an argument for planning it — for matching visitor numbers to what a place can bear. That is the task the final section takes up.
19.6 Problems and Prospects of Tourism in India
India has, on paper, almost everything a tourist could want — the highest mountains, long warm coasts, deserts and rainforests, and a heritage of temples, forts and palaces stretching back thousands of years. And yet, measured against that promise, its tourism is small. This section faces the gap squarely: first the problems that hold India back, then the prospects that could carry it forward.
The Problems
The first and largest problem is infrastructure. Tourism rests on an integrated web of highways, railways, airports, hotels, telecommunications and allied services. A trip is really a chain of links, and the chain is only as strong as its weakest one (Fig. 19.6-1). Good sights count for little if the road to them is broken, the rooms are scarce, or the airport is choked.
Flowchart
Fig. 19.6-1 Caption: A tourist’s trip depends on a chain of links; the weakest one limits the whole. Nodes: Marketing and information reach the traveller → an easy visa → a flight and a working airport → local transport and good roads → a clean, affordable room → the attraction itself → safety throughout the trip → a satisfied visitor → word of mouth brings the next tourist; note — the chain is only as strong as its weakest link: one poor link, such as bad roads, no rooms or unsafe conditions, deters the visitor and breaks the flow
The second problem is selling. India has struggled to market itself effectively — to tell the world about its variety and value. Since the strongest advertisement is a satisfied visitor, and the most damaging is a disappointed one spreading the word, the quality of the whole experience matters as much as the marketing budget.
The third problem is safety and stability. Tourists go where they feel secure. Political unrest, a bandh, ethnic clashes, insurgency in one corner or an epidemic can frighten visitors away from the whole country, not just the trouble spot. It is telling that smaller countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, with far less to show, draw more tourists and greater receipts than India — because they have made the whole visit smooth and safe.
The Prospects
The prospects, though, are bright, because the raw material is unmatched and the gaps are fixable. Entry has been eased through online visas; connectivity is improving through better roads, new airports and comfortable trains — including luxury tourist trains such as the Palace on Wheels — and the huge, steady base of domestic tourism gives the industry ballast that no foreign shock can easily topple.
India can also learn from its small neighbours. Countries such as Bhutan and the Maldives, with a fraction of India’s attractions, have built respected models of sustainable tourism by guarding their environment while they grow. The way forward for India is to market itself as a destination of variety and value, to keep mending the weak links in the chain, and to grow in a planned, sustainable way — the theme of the final section.
19.7 The Path to Sustainable Tourism
The previous sections leave us with a tension. Tourism brings income and jobs that a place badly needs, yet unplanned tourism can wreck the environment those jobs depend on. The way out is not to stop travelling but to travel differently — to grow tourism within the limits a place can bear. This closing section sets out that idea in two parts: eco-tourism, a form of travel built to protect, and the wider principle of keeping tourism to a place’s carrying capacity.
19.7.1 Eco-tourism
Eco-tourism turns the usual relationship on its head. Ordinary mass tourism treats nature as a backdrop to be used; eco-tourism treats it as the thing to be protected. In plain terms, eco-tourism is responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment, supports the well-being of local people, and teaches the visitor about the place.
One early description, by Ziffer, framed it as travel to relatively undisturbed natural areas to study, admire and enjoy their scenery, wild plants and animals, and any cultural features found there. Notice the emphasis on undisturbed and on understanding — an eco-tourist comes to learn and leave lightly, not to consume.
Three pillars hold it up. The first is conservation: the visit must leave the environment intact. The second is local benefit: nearby communities must earn from it, so that protecting nature becomes their livelihood. The third is education: visitors are helped to understand and value what they see.
That logic forms a virtuous loop, the mirror image of the destructive one you saw earlier (Fig. 19.7-1). Where unplanned tourism eats its own foundation, eco-tourism can renew it.
Flowchart
Fig. 19.7-1 Caption: When travel pays local people to protect nature, tourism can sustain the very thing it depends on. Nodes: A protected natural area draws eco-tourists → visitor numbers and their impact are kept low by rules → local people earn from guiding, lodging and handicrafts → they gain a direct stake in keeping the area intact → the habitat and its wildlife are conserved → the attraction stays worth visiting → back to drawing eco-tourists, year after year, without using the place up
India promotes eco-tourism in practical ways. New sites are weighed for their environmental and cultural sensitivity before they are opened up. Hotels and lodges are encouraged to run greener — recycling waste, saving energy, reusing water. And, most important, local communities are drawn into the business, so that the people living beside a forest or a reef have a reason to guard it rather than clear it.
19.7.2 Carrying Capacity and Soft Tourism
Eco-tourism is one answer for natural areas. The broader principle behind it applies everywhere, and it rests on the idea introduced in the last section: carrying capacity. Every place — a beach, a hill town, a temple courtyard — has a limit to the number of visitors it can hold without harm. Good tourism planning means matching visitor numbers to that limit rather than chasing ever-larger crowds.
This gentler, planned approach goes by several names — responsible, environment-friendly, or soft tourism — set against the unplanned, high-volume ‘hard’ or mass tourism that overwhelms a place. The contrast is real. Mass tourism packs the maximum number of people into a spot for a season and lets the strain fall where it may. Soft tourism keeps numbers, building and waste within what the environment can absorb, respects the local culture, and treats the place as a sustainable tourism resource — one to be used in a way that keeps it whole for the future.
The practical measures follow from the idea. Development is held to a threshold — the point beyond which the environment would suffer. Visitors are spread across the seasons rather than crammed into a few weeks, which also eases the seasonality problem met earlier. Construction is limited, waste and water are managed, fragile sites are protected, and local people are made partners in the plan.
The town that opened this chapter learned the lesson the hard way, when its crowds outran its water. The message of the whole chapter is that this need not happen. Growth and conservation are not enemies. A place planned to its carrying capacity can welcome visitors, earn from them, and still be there — unspoilt — for the visitors of the next generation.
19.8 Summary
Tourism is the temporary movement of people away from their usual surroundings and back, together with the services that support them. What defines it is the round journey, not the reason for it — so a conference visitor is as much a tourist as a holidaymaker.
It is best seen not as a place but as a flow: an attraction generates a movement of people, and that movement generates spending, jobs and pressure. The whole chapter follows this one flow and what it does at both ends.
Tourism is sorted two ways — by border (domestic within a country; foreign, either inbound or outbound) and by purpose (pilgrimage, pleasure, business or MICE, and niche forms such as medical, adventure and eco-tourism).
Domestic travel dwarfs foreign — roughly 1.65 billion visits against about 10 million foreign arrivals in 2017 — and by carrying people across regions it quietly builds national integration.
Indian tourism grew out of pilgrimage, which is why its tourist map first formed around holy places; the balance later tilted toward pleasure, and planned promotion began in the 1950s.
The industry runs as three flows: inbound (small but rich in foreign exchange), outbound (larger — India is a net sender of tourists), and domestic (by far the largest). The state promotes it through the ITDC and schemes such as online visas, homestays, Swadeshi Darshan and PRASAD.
Tourism’s advantages flow from the multiplier effect, by which one tourist’s spending supports more than a rupee of local activity as it passes from hand to hand. It earns foreign exchange, sustains handicrafts, and is highly labour-intensive — supporting tens of millions of direct and indirect jobs, many held by women, though many are seasonal and low-paid.
Hotels are the industry’s hinge; India grades them by a star classification and a heritage category, but the supply of rooms lags behind demand.
India’s attractions sit where physical geography and history placed them — the Himalaya’s cool hill stations, shrines and wildlife; the plains’ monuments and holy cities; the plateau and coasts’ temples, caves, forts and beaches; the islands’ coral and rainforest. Each is the record of a cause: altitude for a hill station, a sacred river for a holy city, the Deccan Trap’s soft basalt for rock-cut caves.
Tourism’s local gains — jobs, a market for crafts, new infrastructure — are real but smaller and shakier than they appear, cut by leakage, seasonality and over-dependence.
Environmentally, tourism packs many people into fragile places for a short season; pushed beyond a place’s carrying capacity, it brings water shortage, waste and unplanned building, and can destroy the very charm that drew the crowd.
Despite unmatched attractions, India draws under one per cent of the world’s tourists — held back not by its sights but by weak infrastructure, poor marketing and safety worries. Its prospects are bright: easier visas, better connectivity, a vast domestic base, and sustainable models to learn from.
The path forward is sustainable tourism. Eco-tourism aligns the visitor’s interest with the resource’s survival, so that local people earn by conserving nature; soft, planned tourism keeps numbers within carrying capacity. Growth and conservation, planned well, need not be enemies.
Flowchart
Fig. 19.8-1 Caption: The whole chapter on one page — a flow of tourists that can either wear a place out or sustain it, depending on how it is managed. Nodes: An attraction, natural or cultural, draws a flow of tourists (domestic and foreign) → the flow generates a tourist economy: foreign exchange, jobs, a market for handicrafts → the same flow also generates pressure on water, land and waste → the outcome forks on how it is managed; Branch 1 — unplanned, beyond carrying capacity → degradation: shortage, pollution, lost charm → the attraction weakens → back to a diminished draw (vicious loop); Branch 2 — planned as soft and eco-tourism, within carrying capacity → local people earn from conserving → the attraction is kept whole → back to a lasting draw, year after year (virtuous loop)
What This Chapter Cannot Tell You
The arrival, earning and employment figures are national totals. A single all-India number hides enormous variation — between states, between the crowded season and the empty one, and between one town and the next. ‘Carrying capacity’ is a powerful idea but a hard one to pin to an exact number, so where a place’s limit lies is often argued rather than measured. And a job count says nothing about the quality of those jobs — how many are secure, and how many vanish when the season ends.
19.9 Key Terms
Adventure tourism — travel for active, often outdoor pursuits such as trekking, rafting and mountaineering.
Business tourism — travel undertaken for work, such as meetings, deals and conferences, using the same services as holiday travel.
Carrying capacity — the largest number of visitors a place can hold without harm to its environment or to the visitor’s experience.
Direct employment — jobs within tourism itself, such as in hotels, airlines and travel agencies.
Domestic tourism — travel within one’s own country, needing no passport or currency exchange.
Eco-tourism — responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment, benefits local people and educates the visitor.
Foreign Exchange Earnings (FEE) — the foreign currency that inbound tourists spend in the country they visit.
Foreign tourism — travel that crosses national borders; also called international tourism.
Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTA) — the number of foreign visitors entering a country in a year.
Heritage hotels — old palaces, havelis, forts and residences built before 1950 and converted into hotels while keeping their original character.
Hill station — a town developed high in the mountains as a cool-climate retreat.
Inbound tourism — foreigners travelling into a country; seen from India, foreigners arriving here.
Indirect employment — jobs in the activities that supply tourism, such as handicrafts, food supply and transport.
Leakage — the share of tourist spending that flows straight out of the local economy to outside firms and suppliers.
Local handicrafts and cultural activities — local crafts and performances that gain a market from tourists, giving many artisans a livelihood.
Medical tourism — travel across borders to obtain healthcare, often at lower cost or shorter wait than at home.
MICE — business tourism organised around meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions.
Multiplier effect — the way one rupee of tourist spending supports more than a rupee of activity as it passes from hand to hand.
National integration — the sense of belonging to one nation across differences of region, language and faith.
Outbound tourism — a country’s own residents travelling abroad; seen from India, Indians going overseas.
Pilgrimage tourism — travel to sacred places such as temples, shrines, mosques, gurudwaras and churches.
Pleasure tourism — travel for rest, enjoyment and sightseeing.
Seasonality — the tendency of tourist arrivals to crowd into a few months and leave the rest of the year quiet.
Soft tourism — planned, low-impact tourism kept within a place’s carrying capacity and respectful of its people; the opposite of unplanned mass tourism.
Star classification — the grading of hotels from one star to five-star deluxe by the range of facilities they offer.
Sustainable tourism — tourism developed so as to meet present needs without degrading the resource for future visitors.
Tourism — the temporary movement of people to places outside their usual surroundings, together with the services that support them.
Tourism industry — the cluster of services a traveller needs: transport, lodging, food, guiding, handicrafts and entertainment.
Tourist — a person who travels away from their usual surroundings meaning to return home.
Tourist flow — the movement of travellers between where they live and where they visit, measured as trips and the money that moves with them.
Wellness tourism — travel for health and rejuvenation, such as yoga and Ayurveda.
19.10 Points to Ponder
Domestic tourism carries more than a hundred times as many journeys as foreign tourism, and it does something foreign tourism cannot — it binds a diverse country together. Why, then, do governments pour so much effort into chasing the far smaller foreign flow?
A resort can be packed with visitors and yet leave the people who live there little better off. Walking through such a town, what would you look for to tell whether tourism was truly enriching it or mostly passing through on its way out?
The same tourist spending can either wear a place out or help protect it. Looking at the two loops in this chapter, what is it exactly that decides which loop a given destination falls into?
Two people standing in the same crowded hill town disagree on whether it is ‘too full’. Can a place’s carrying capacity ever be a single fixed number, or must it always depend on who is measuring it and what they value?
India’s tourist map first grew around holy places rather than beaches or hills. If travellers were ‘discovering’ the country for the first time today, would that map look different — and what would decide the new pattern of where people go?
19.11 Objective Questions
- Which of the following counts as an example of outbound tourism for India? [1 mark]
- A German family visiting Jaipur
- A family from Delhi holidaying in Goa
- An Indian couple travelling to Singapore
- A pilgrim from Chennai visiting Tirupati
- The ‘multiplier effect’ in tourism refers to: [1 mark]
- the rising number of tourists each year
- the way one tourist’s spending supports more than a rupee of local activity
- the increase in hotel star ratings over time
- the growth of outbound over inbound tourism
- Which scheme is aimed specifically at developing and upgrading places of pilgrimage? [1 mark]
- Swadeshi Darshan
- PRASAD
- Visa-on-Arrival
- Bed and Breakfast Scheme
- A Himalayan hill station stays cool chiefly because: [1 mark]
- it lies close to the sea
- air temperature falls with altitude
- it receives far less sunlight than the plains
- it always lies in a rain shadow
- Assertion (A): Domestic tourism gives the Indian tourism industry a steady base. Reason (R): Domestic tourist visits far outnumber foreign arrivals and are less easily deterred by distant events. Choose the correct option: [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
- Assertion (A): Unplanned tourism can destroy the very attraction that draws visitors. Reason (R): When visitor numbers exceed a place’s carrying capacity, degradation such as water shortage and pollution sets in. Choose the correct option: [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
- Match each attraction in Column A with its state in Column B: [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Kaziranga | i. Gujarat |
| b. Gir forest | ii. Assam |
| c. Backwaters of Alappuzha | iii. Kerala |
| d. Konark Sun Temple | iv. Odisha |
Fill in the blank: The share of tourist spending that flows straight out of the local economy to outside firms and suppliers is called __________. [1 mark]
State whether True or False: India receives more foreign tourists each year than the number of its own nationals who travel abroad. [1 mark]
19.12 Check Your Concepts
Define tourism, and state one way in which a tourist differs from a migrant. [2 marks]
What is meant by the ‘carrying capacity’ of a tourist place? Give one example of what happens when it is exceeded. [2 marks]
Differentiate between inbound and outbound tourism, giving one Indian example of each. [3 marks]
Give reasons why tourism in India developed first around places of pilgrimage rather than beaches or hills. [3 marks]
Explain why tourism is said to have ‘vast employment potential’, distinguishing direct from indirect employment. [3 marks]
Explain the multiplier effect in tourism, using an example of how one tourist’s spending spreads through a town. [4 marks]
What is eco-tourism, and how is it promoted in India? Explain how it can make conservation worthwhile for local communities. [4 marks]
Describe the two-sided impact of tourism on the environment and on the local economy of a place, giving the causes and consequences on each side. [6 marks]
“India draws under one per cent of the world’s tourists despite unmatched attractions.” Discuss the problems that hold Indian tourism back and the prospects that could carry it forward, with Indian examples. [6 marks]
19.13 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation
- On an outline map of India, mark and label each of the following, and name the type of attraction each represents: [4 marks]
- Kaziranga National Park
- the Taj Mahal at Agra
- Kovalam beach
- the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
- Study Table 19.1 (Domestic and foreign tourism in India, 2017). [4 marks]
- By roughly how many times did domestic tourist visits exceed foreign tourist arrivals in 2017? Show your working.
- State one important thing this table does NOT tell you about these travellers.
- In 2017 the world recorded about 1,300 million international tourist arrivals, of which India received about 10 million. [4 marks]
- Calculate India’s percentage share of world tourist arrivals. Show your working.
- With reference to Fig. 19.6-1, explain why India’s share stays small even though it has so many attractions.
- Compare Fig. 19.5-1 (the degradation loop) with Fig. 19.7-1 (the eco-tourism loop). Explain how the two loops differ in what happens to the attraction over time, and what makes the difference. [3 marks]