*Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Karnataka State Open University, Mukthagangothri, Mysore
**Professor, Department of Economics, Tumkur University, Tumkur-572103, Karnataka
Online published on 27 January, 2017.
Tourism has been identified as one of the India's biggest industries with the GDP contribution of 6.36 per cent for the year 2014. More than that, tourism is considered as a multidimensional activity with its multiple economic impacts. This paper presents how tourism has come out to be an important sector in the Indian economy in terms of its economic impacts. This paper made an attempt to analysis the growth of tourism industry and its contribution to the employment and human resource development, foreign exchange earnings and revenue for the government and growth of social and economic overhead capital. Further, this paper makes an attempt to evaluate the constraints faced by the Indian tourism industry. It has been identified that employment share in this sector is very low compared to the other countries in the world and there is a big gap between demand and supply of human resource too. It has been found that low share of foreign exchange earnings and tourist arrivals to India and inadequate infrastructure development in tourism industry continue to be the worrisome features. We therefore make an attempt to devise some policy alternatives for the future development of the tourism industry in particular and the service sector in general.
