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India promotes Buddhist tourism to attract Japanese travelers
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Monks and other people rushing to 24.38 meters Buddha statue in Bodhgaya, India, on Jan. 8, 2013. (Shutterstock/File)
I
ndia is in the throes of promoting Buddhist tourism in a bid to attract more tourists from countries with sizable Buddhist populations, including Japan, as part of a strategy to boost foreign tourist arrivals.
India is not only organizing an international Buddhist conclave every alternate year but is also aggressively developing a Buddhist Circuit which connects key places associated with the Buddhist heritage to attract more Buddhist tourists, government officials say.
"We are receiving a minuscule number of Buddhist tourists...just 0.005 percent of the total Buddhist population in the world despite being a key pilgrimage destination for millions of practicing Buddhists around the world," Suman Billa, the Indian ministry of tourism's joint secretary, recently told journalists in New Delhi.
"The idea is, even if we are able to remove one zero and make it 0.05 percent, that'll still bring in billions of dollars into our tourism economy."
According to tourism ministry officials, India has sanctioned five projects worth Rs3.61 billion (about $5.5 million) and has also worked with International Finance Corp. of the World Bank group and other agencies to ramp up infrastructure around the Buddhist Circuit.
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As both India and Japan are trying to push bilateral travel and tourism with an aim to triple the number of Indian and Japanese tourists in the next five years, the promotion of Buddhist tourism is one of various initiatives to attract more Japanese travelers to India, Billa told NNA.
As part of its plan to promote India's Buddhism tourism among Japanese travelers, the South Asian nation's tourism office in Tokyo sponsored visits of 10 Japanese tour operators, opinion leaders and journalists for the biennial International Buddhist Conclave in 2014 and invited six Japanese travel industry people again in 2016 to attend the conclave.
The first Indo-Japan Tourism Council and Indo-Japan Tourism Summit were also held in New Delhi in 2016 to explore opportunities to expand travel and tourism between the two countries.
According to the latest tourism ministry report, the number of Japanese tourist arrivals in India in 2016 totaled 208,847, compared with only 29,032 in 1981, reflecting growing business and cultural ties between the two countries.
"The majority of these Japanese visiting India are business tourists accounting over 60 percent, while the rest accounts for leisure tourism" such as trips to Buddhist sites in India, a senior tourism ministry official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
According to the official, popular Buddhist sites among Japanese and other foreign tourists include Bodhgaya, Nalanda, Rajgir, Kushinagar, Sarnath, Sanchi, Ajanta Caves, Dhauli and Dharamshala.
