BEIJING: India and China should unleash the potential of enhancing people-to-people contacts through tourism, Indian Ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale has said. Minister of State for Tourism K J Alphons, accompanied by about 20 Indian tour operators are touring Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai to enhance efforts to attract more Chinese tourists to India.
Only 240,000 Chinese tourists, out of over 144 million who travelled abroad last year, visited India in 2017 despite e-vasa facilities. Alphons and his team held a roadshow in Beijing on August 28 and showcased India’s tourism potential at a similar event in Wuhan where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping had held an informal summit in April this year.
“One of the areas of consensus between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi when they met here in Wuhan is that there are inadequate people-to-people exchanges between our two countries,” Bambawale said while speaking at the Wuhan event. One way to address this problem is to have more tourists travel to each other’s country.
For that to happen, all travel agents and operators from India and China should work together and offer attractive packages to tourists in each country, he said. “Our people are experiencing rising living standards and therefore more of them are travelling to foreign lands. Surely this is a potential which is untapped and which we need to unleash,” he said. He suggested Chinese tourists to travel to the Golden Triangle of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur and the Buddhist Trail from Delhi to Varanasi and Bodh Gaya. PTI
