Category Archives: MOT

G. Kishan Reddy, Minister of Tourism, said, “Without connectivity, there cannot be any investment or development, which is why connectivity is the key to the country’s growth. India is the only nation that builds 30 km of national highway every day, thus creating continuous connectivity.”  

Ministry of Tourism is organizing roadshows across the country to draw investors ahead of the Global Tourism Investors Summit 2023. Roadshow have already been organised in Bengaluru & Kolkata and are due to happen in Chandigarh, Mumbai and Guwahati on 17, 19 and 20 January 2023.

Arvind Singh, Secretary, Tourism has said, “We have supported the UDAN scheme in several tourism routes and will continue to do so. The scheme has gained attraction and it has helped to provide connectivity and access to remote areas to smaller airports and airports which were never heard of.”

The Ministry’s new scheme ‘PM’s Development Initiative for the NER – PMDevINE – with an outlay of Rs 6,600 cr has been approved earlier in Oct 2022 separately under which larger and high impact proposals under infrastructure, social development and livelihood sectors are taken, says G. Kishan Reddy, Minister, DoNER. Scheme will transform the North-Eastern Region and boost socio-economic empowerment and enable livelihood opportunities.

Arvind Singh, Secretary, MoT said that the government wants to focus on green growth, sustainable development, and penetration of digital initiatives in tourism. “Our penetration in tourism is not so much and that is one of the areas where we rank low in our global rankings”, he said. 

Ministry of Tourism has announced the first ever Global Tourism Investors Summit 2023, which will be held between 10-12 April 2023, at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. It is aimed at bringing together global business and thought leaders, policy makers; to understand & explore Tourism Business opportunities in India.

Harpreet Singh (IPoS), Joint Secretary, Ministry of Development of North-Eastern Region (DONER), mentioned that tourism continues to be an important sector for the Indian economy and majority of the infrastructure development projects undertaken by the Government are towards the tourism sector. He added that the 8 states of NER comprising 8% of the area of the country and close to 4% of the population has huge potential for tourism but it still has only 0.3% share of domestic tourists and 0.93% share of the foreign tourists. There holds immense potential which needs to be tapped in the NE region through effective infrastructure development and better connectivity, added Singh.

Union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia hailed the rapid uptick in the usage of the DigiYatra app at Varanasi airport, saying that it had improved the ease of travel considerably. The DigiYatra facility will allow passengers to link their travel and identity documents and create a facial scan beforehand, which will do away with the need for them to produce boarding passes or identity cards when they arrive at an airport, drop their baggage, or proceed for boarding. Instead, passengers will need to show their face to a facial recognition camera to authenticate themselves.

Arvind Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, mentioned that the recovery of India’s tourism post Covid can be witnessed through the whooping number of tourists of approximately 20 lakhs, who visited Jammu & Kashmir till October 2022. “As most of the countries of Asia Pacific opened up a little late post Covid as a preventive measure, we are still going slow on global tourists coming into India, affecting our inbound numbers but we have been able to revive strongly due to our rapid vaccination drive and prompt Government action for opening up to the globe attracting foreign tourists,” he said.

Arvind Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, has said that the Mission LiFE by Govt has lot of relevance for travel & tourism. “All the stakeholders can contribute to mission life by adopting responsible tourism practices,” he added.