India Sees 4.5 Pct Increase in Tourist Arrivals, Majority Arrive from U.S.

Bangalore: Tourism is one of the significant sources of economic development and a means to curtail the problems of unemployment in India. During the year 2011-2012, the Ministry of Tourism had passed 160 tourism projects for an amount of 710.02 crore for tourism infrastructure development to States/ UTs. As such, the influx of foreign tourist in India grew by about 4.5 percent from 6.30 million in 2011 to 6.57 million in 2012, as reported by Himanshi Dhawan for TOI.

But the arrival of tourists has seen a tremendous fall from about 9 percent growth in 2011 compared to 2010, but it still doubles the world standard based on the latest data from the Bureau of Immigration.

In the meantime, the U.S. still continues as the top country with 1 million tourists in 2012, whereas the number of tourists from the countries like UK, Sri Lanka and Malaysia came down in 2012.

The top 10 countries which boost the tourism sector of the country still remain the same. These countries are U.S., UK, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and Malaysia.

In 2012, 1.03 million tourists were from the U.S., with an increase from 0.98 million in 2011. There was also an increase of 0.46 million to 0.48 million tourists from Bangladesh while visitors from UK have declined only from 0.79 million to 0.78 million.