Jharkhand tourism department has invested in serious promotion and at its pavilion at the India International Trade Fair - which drew a little under 1.1 lakh visitors on Sunday - Jharkhand has presented its prettiest face.
There is one kind of tourist who never stayed away. From April 2009 to March 2010, the state played host to 2.4 crore domestic tourists and 17,000 foreigners. Tourism director Siddharth Tripathi says 70% of the domestic travellers visited the state with "a spiritual or religious purpose" with several spots in Jharkhand - including Ranchi, Deoghar, Parasnath Temple, Itkhori - attracting over five lakh visitors in a year. But that's still nowhere near the kind of business Jharkhand has the potential to get.
Tourist visits to places like Netarhat (a hill station in Latehar district) and Betla National Park (a tiger reserve) had declined to nothing in the last four-five years till the tourism department began advertising, targeting, mainly, the Bengalis. "We have organized three tourism fairs in Kolkata in the past seven months and have run 10 minutes of ads every day on a Bengali TV channel," says Tripathi. It worked. "This year, we made a turn-around," he says. "People are going back to these places."
Based on all these, the state is hardselling every kind of tourism - rural, adventure, heritage, tribal, eco, religious. Even Jhankhand's mines present a new, if radical, opportunity for tourism. "If the ground situation improves, we can have 10-12 crore visitors every year," says Tripathi.
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