Great tourism statistics has great ideas working for them
Look at any of the cities or countries where tourists queue to go to and the first realization is that the government, big corporates, and the people have come together and woven mysteries that bring in people with a lot of curiosity within them. I believe in this I seriously thought I’m the only one until I attended the Arunachal Pradesh Tourism Conclave and heard Kiren Rijiju our minister of State for Home.
Rijiju did not mince his words when he gave the example of Orlando in Georgia in the US where the government bodies and business conglomerates got together and created Disneyland. Linking this to the need for tourists in Arunachal Pradesh he added that state has heritage, history, culture, adventure, nature, and wildlife waiting to be harnessed. ‘Tawang with its pristine beauty,’ he said, ‘has a monastery that adds to the value of the place.’
Tourism then doesn’t get its statistics magically. There are great ideas working for them. We all know that the five top destinations for tourists are France, US, Spain, China, and Italy with each of them getting over 50 million footfalls as the inbound tourist count. And with all the mesmerizing beauty and magic of diverse culture, heritage, food habits, dialects and languages, all that India gets is a fraction of this that barely reach 9 million.
Let me take Arunachal Pradesh as an example. This state is interconnected that make it an accessible state and the 12 connecting circuits have the potential to make it an amazing travel experience. The state is loaded with 26 major tribes and 100 sub-tribes that gift it a culturally rich eco-system that any other place in the world would envy. There are over 500 varieties of orchids blooming on the slopes… and 10 sanctuaries and national parks walking hand-in-hand with bio-diversity… and with around 82% of the landmass covered by evergreen forests, there are a million things to be explored. And while I am talking about all this, let me not forget to mention the history and culture filled genetics of Tawang Monastery overlooking the Tawang valley at an altitude of 10,000 feet.
History, culture, and nature have already injected all possible ingredients into the 83,743 sq kms and the approximately 1.255 million plus population (2012 census) of Arunachal Pradesh. Additionally, they have the Gayal as the official animal and the Great Hornbill as the official bird. Are you aware that this state from India holds the most north-eastern position among the states in the north-east region of India? See, there are hundreds of things that you are not even aware of.
All this information needs to rise and reach out to minds and the hearts of those who are anyway in love with exploring the world. The 3.5 lakh tourist inflow in 2016 certainly needs a booster dose. A part of the solution is resident in what Dr Joram Beda, Tourism Secretary, Government of Arunachal Pradesh meant when he talked about the need to invest in adventure and exotic tourism and added that ‘theme-based events like the Tawang festival, Ziro festival of music, Arunachal spring carnival, adventure at Mechuka as also the Kameng river festival’ are already there but more needs to be done. He mentioned that a major thrust would come from ‘the role of tourism partners in building awareness and encouraging on the unique attractions this state offers’ and that in 2017, ‘we expect the number of tourist arrivals to grow exponentially’. Lots of vital MoUs were signed and they included Oxigen Wallet as the official E-wallet Partner to promote cashless transactions in the tourism sector of the state, MakeMyTrip.com in the Online Travel Portal Category to drive tourists into the state of Arunachal Pradesh using its online Portal and its associated digital platforms, Travel Agents Association of India (TAAI) to protect the interest of the industry and safeguard the travelling public from exploitation, Fly Wings (FWSTC) for Hospitality Training to lead the initiative to assist the unemployed youth to get trained under the Tourism and Hospitality Management programme, the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) as the official Creative and Brand Development partner to the department of Tourism to provide support in creating effective branding and creative campaigns for the state’s tourism initiatives.
The question now is if all these collaborations will come together to create the right foundation for a tourism thrust or not. Let me add here that a few other collaborations must be sought. There are a lot of those who believe that tourism is an intrusion of privacy in some ways but, believe me, to go to strange lands and cultures and to interact with the people there is the one learning that cannot be taught in schools and through text-books. But tourists need to respect local sensibilities and this is the first collaboration that we as tourists must get into. There are some who believe that tourists are corrosive and step away from accountability of any sort… well, as a tourists we too need to collaborate with wherever we are going to and make efforts to ensure that we do not cause any sort of disturbance. Now these aren’t going to come to us MoUs to be signed… but our own sensibilities must take an account of them. Only then we will have really arrived in the world of tourism.
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Shri Kiren Rijiju, Honourable Union Minister of State for Home, Govt of India
Shri Joram Beda, Tourism Secretary, Govt of Arunachal Pradesh & Sushil
Shri Joram Beda, Tourism Secretary, Govt of Arunachal Pradesh & Pramod
Arunachal Pradesh pamphlets tell us about their intent to promote tourism in India
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Arvind Passey
30 March 2017
