The Ministry of Tourism has launched a campaign to radically improve the quality of the Indian tourism product through a three-fold strategy that aims at upgrading wayside facilities, making heritage properties the best in the world and reducing the interface of a foreign tourist with just one person at the time of arrival in India.

This was stated here today by Mr. Sujit Bannerjee, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, at a workshop on ‘India Inbound’ at the Great Indian Travel Bazaar (GITB) 2010.

Mr. Bannerjee said, “There is a life of discovery in India. Things are as yet not world class standards, but it is my priority to eliminate the hassles faced by a foreign tourist” by ensuring that he is not approached by scores of people on his arrival to this country.


Speaking on the developments in the promotion of rural tourism in India, Mr. Bannerjee said that rural tourism sites have grown from about 36 to 150. These sites, he said, take the tourists to the heart of India and enable them to experience how India lives in villages. More importantly, the development of these sites has led to the revival of the dying arts and handicrafts into marketable concepts.

Participants at another workshop on E-Tourism were of the view that while e-commerce had come into its own, travel agents and tour operators still had an important role to play. So long as the agent is able to create value for the customer through specialized knowledge, his position was not under threat. In fact, for a country like India that had such a huge number of products on offer, a specialist travel agent was indispensable to tie up the bits and piece of information into a cohesive body of information for the customers.