Tourism and Development: A Case of Incredible India

Tourism emerged as world's one of the fastest growing industries, offers a greater scope for economic, social, cultural and regional development. International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism (1981) defined tourism in terms of particular activities selected by choice and undertaken outside the home. In overall, tourism brings the opportunity for strengthening and creating infrastructure development meant for tourists, tourism service providers and the local community. Generally tourism is of two type's namely domestic/internal and foreign/international tourism. The international tourism creates inter-cultural, trade and economic relations and thus helps to earn foreign exchange and serves as tool for solving balance of payment, problems. While analysing the tourism literature, one can find new tourism concepts, such as (Adventure Tourism, Archaeological tourism, Beach Tourism, Community Tourism, Medical Tourism, Sports Tourism, Sustainable Tourism, Wildlife Tourism, Wine Tourism etc.,) providing a new scopes and opportunities for tourism industry. Tourism of any kind plays a vital role in the economic development and economic growth of any economy. Two universally accepted yardsticks have traditionally been used to measure the tourism index of any country or regions are: International tourist arrivals and International tourism receipts. (Holden 2006) explained the concept ‘international tourism as ‘the receipts earned by a destination country from inbound tourism including all tourism receipts resulting from expenditure made by visitors from abroad, on for instance lodging, food, drinks, fuel, transport in the country, entertainment, shopping, etc.’ Moreover the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, is trying to create interest and awareness about tourism destinations in the overseas markets through campaigns like “Incredible India”. With this background, the authors have made an attempt to study the economic significance of tourism in terms of international tourists’ arrivals and foreign exchange earnings in India.