Tourism in north east India's state of Tripura: Paradise unexplored

Tourism has become a major sector of economic activity worldwide, covering a broad range of enterprises, areas and stakeholders. It is one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the world. Tourism thus can go a long way in changing the fortunes of the country which is always reeling under the problem of unemployment and fiscal deficit. Foreign tourism along with domestic tourism may contribute to India in its mission of becoming a developed country by 2020. The whole north eastern region of India has tremendous tourism potentialities but still miles to go to exploit the proper potentialities. In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine the present trend of tourism with different potentials in Tripura because the state has recently connected with the other parts of the country by virtue of starting broad gauge railways. The study used Statistics of Indian Tourism and also collected filled up questionnaire from 92 tourists of Tripura to examine the present position of Tripura as compared to different states of India and perception of tourist about the potentialities of tourism in Tripura. The study observed that the state has lot of potentialities for tourism development. Moreover the tourist including foreign are regularly visiting the state as because of availability of few renowned tourist spots like Neermahal, Mata Bhari, the border with Bangladesh. Nevertheless, the public private participation could be an effective mechanism to undertake the strategy of marketing, maintenance of the spots, security of tourist, opening of more tourist lodge, behavior of people who are connected directly or indirectly with tourism industry and continuous monitoring for sustainable development of tourism industry in Tripura.