Retorting to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF)Annual Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report, which places India once again at the 65th spot, the ministry of tourism has highlighted that the ranking is biased due to a substantial element of vague indicators.
?Out of the 71 indicators considered for compilation of the index in 2008 the ministry has pointed out that only 46 indicators were used in 2007. Further, hard data have been used only for 42 indicators out of 71 and for others the results of executive opinion survey conducted by WEF have been used, ” a release from the ministry said. It further noted, “Surprisingly, the details of the methodology of the survey such as sample size, selection of executives, etc are also not given in the report. Due to perception bias of the respondents in the opinion surveys, the results of such cannot be seen in a piecemeal interpretation, which has been done in certain sections of the press which is quite inappropriate.”
According to the ministry’s data, India has shown an impressive performance in the tourism sector with foreign tourist arrivals growing at about 12.4% and foreign exchange earnings in dollar terms growing at about 34% over the previous year.
India has not only attracted a large proportion of the world tourism market but has also been able to capture high-end tourists who are spending a longer duration in India.
The UN-WTO’s latest report indicates that even though countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore may be having larger number of foreign tourist arrivals but the foreign exchange earned per foreign tourist of India which stood at about $1,920 was much higher than that of Indonesia ($905), Thailand ($830) and Singapore ($835) and Malaysia ($520).
