Despite the enormous potential offered by the landscape of the country, its potential for tourism has hardly been tapped into. Many people in the villages of India spend their entire lifetime in the same district or state and never venture beyond to traverse the boundaries of this great country. However, the new generation is very enthusiastic about exploring the beauty and adventures that this country provides. The World Travel & Tourism Council expect the Indian Tourism industry to become the fourth-largest behind China, the U.S and Germany in less than 10 years. The number of international tourists visiting the country is growing exponentially with more than 10 million international tourists visiting the country in 2017. But the real growth is coming from the resurgent domestic tourists who account for more than 90 percent of total travelers. Indian Tourism generated more than $230 billion in 2017, up from almost $209 billion in 2016. For the last three years, their most popular destination has been the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu, thanks to pilgrims eager to visit its many temples. Ahmed Chamanwala, the founder of the Fringe Ford, a five-room lodge in Kerala state, which sits on a 527-acre forest home to more than 400 kinds of animals says that “Indians have finally started discovering their own country, During our initial years, most of our tourists were inbound travelers. But over the years we have seen an increase in the domestic weekend travelers from the major cities in India. Now the business is more dependent on the Indian market.”
The only problem with the growing Indian tourism industry is that the conservation of tourist sites is not being taken seriously. In some areas, tiger reserves no longer have tigers, and nature safaris can feel like crowded parking lots where there are more shutterbugs than subjects to shoot. These worries are most pronounced in the high-altitude Himalayan desert of Ladakh in Jammu & Kashmir, which was kept protected by the Indian army for years. But now almost 2.5 million Indians visit annually, eager to see landscapes featured in Bollywood films. Right now, there are about 650 hotels and homestays in a district with 4,300 households—too many for the land to support. There’s talk of capping visitors, but with no standard regulations while no one wants to turn off the money machine. Tourism in places such as Ladakh hinges on a pristine environmental image, but visitors produce thousands of pounds of trash each year. More than 30,000 plastic water bottles are dumped in open-air landfills in Ladakh each summer. On Mt. Everest in neighboring Nepal, there’s an estimated 8 to 10 metric tonnes of everything from empty oxygen canisters to tents and even bodies on the mountain.
The environmental problems faced by natural tourist hotspots are a prime concern for the country. Indian Tourism experts across the country express concern that some tourist destinations could lose their appeal much before reaching their peaks due to rampant environmental degradation. If India wants to exploit its tourism potential fully, then we have to cap the number of visitors and put strict penalties on the littering of tourist sites.
