As per a recent annual report of the Union tourism ministry on the number of tourists visiting Chhattisgarh has risen to 1.49 crore tourist footfalls between June 2011-May 2012, a figure that baffles even the tourism ministry officials of the state.

Usually, such a high number of inbound tourists would be welcomed by any state tourism department as it projects its robustness, but officials here are both shocked and awed as these figures show a gigantic and an unprecedented leap from their own data of preceding years. Interestingly, the state tourism department collected no data during this survey period. "The Central tourism department was already doing a survey for this period so we left it on them," a senior tourism department official told TOI.

As compared to the 11-month data presented in the Union government's report, numbers collected by the Chhattisgarh department for inbound tourists in 2009 and 2010 stand at 5.13 lakhs and 5.68 lakhs respectively.

If insiders are to be believed, tourism officials here had conveyed their doubts about the figures to their counterparts in the Union government but they have stuck to the numbers. As a result, after the initial number shock, state tourism officials have now started accepting the figures and are touting it as an achievement.

The tourism ministry's report, Tourism Survey for the State of Chhattisgarh (June 2011 to May 2012), was prepared by a Delhi based company, Datamation Consultants Pvt Ltd. Admitting that the high numbers in the report did surprise them initially, Sanjay Singh, general manager, Chhattisgarh tourism department told TOI that the state department's data could be flawed as there was no proper method of collection of figures of inbound tourists.

Singh said while the state department was only collecting data from tourism hotels and information centres, Datamation have gone into further details of collecting figures from all available sources.

As per the report, the data has been collected from ticketing destinations, physical counts at non-ticketing destinations, accommodation units (hotels, tourist lodges, dharamshalas, motels, government, private companies, guest houses etc), and exit surveys at various tourist destinations.

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