Visitor number growth cannot be the matrix to measure the success of tourism programmes and initiatives of the government targeted at North East region, says Tourism Ministry.
Addressing the delegates of the 13th International Tourism Mart (ITM) 2025 for North East Region of India virtually, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Union Minister for Culture and Tourism, has said that tourism infrastructure development in the region should be sensitive to its fragile ecology and principles of sustainable and inclusive tourism should guide all kinds of development activities. He said that the world tourism is moving towards nature-based and people and culture-oriented experiential tourism, and the North East region is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the new trend in tourism.
“Our goal is to make North East one of the most leading sustainable tourism destinations of the world,” the Minister said. Citing the recent listing of Assam by New York Times as one of the 52 must visit destinations in 2025 as the indicator of the growing interest of the travel world in the north east, the he said that the Tourism Ministry is supporting the region through its flagship programmes of Swadesh Darshan and PRASHAD in creating world-class tourism experiences. He said that his Ministry has approved projects worth INR 3,000 crore in the region under these flagship programmes.
Along with the government investments, he said that the private investors’ confidence in the region has also improved in the last few years, Around 3,000 new branded hotel rooms are expected to be added in different states by 2030.
Earlier, when TravelBiz Monitor posed a question to the top tourism officials as to the not-so-encouraging figures in tourist visitations, both domestic and international, to the region in the last few years, despite consistent efforts by the Central Ministry through platforms like ITM, they informed that visitor growth numbers alone could not be the true matrix for measuring the success of the programmes and initiatives in the north-east region.
Responding to the question, Suman Billa, Additional Secretary and Director General Tourism, Government of India, said that taking into account the fragile ecosystem and the carrying capacity issues of the region, the promotions have never been intended at push tourism “indiscriminately” into the region. “The endeavour has always been to create authentic experiences and push hi-end tourism. The agenda of the ITM has always been to connect hi-end experiences and products of the region with the hi-value tourist market around the world,” Billa said.
The 13th ITM 2025 organised at the aegis of the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, with Sikkim as host state this year, at Gangtok is attended by 39 international hosted buyers from 19 countries of the world and and nearly 90 domestic buyers drawn from 26 states in the country.
As per Ministry of Tourism’s own statistics for 2024, 11.4 million tourists visited the north-east region, which is less than one percent of the total domestic tourism visits in the country.