'Bodh Gaya should be Vatican of East': Author blasts govt for letting Indian tourism rot

India's 1.4 billion people attract fewer foreign tourists than a single European city, said author and scientist Dr Anand Ranganathan, who blasted the Indian government for failing to act on "low-hanging fruit" like tourism during an event organized by WMG Group.

"A small city like Paris, one city, attracts 25 million foreign tourists every year. India, a population of 1.4 billion people, attracts 11 million tourists a year," Ranganathan said. "We are an 8,000-year-old civilization. We have hundreds of languages to impress people by, thousands of cuisines. We have 42 World Heritage Sites. Greece has half those, and yet we attract one-third of the foreign tourists that Greece does."

He said the mismatch between India's cultural depth and its tourism figures reveals deep confusion about the role of the state. "Only 30 million Indians are directly employed in the tourism sector. We should be having 300 million Indians employed there," he said. "Tourism as a sector contributes only 2.6% to our GDP—it should be five times that."

Citing international comparisons, he pointed to Bodh Gaya, which he said should have been developed as the Vatican of the East. "Bodh Gaya should be the Vatican of the East—it is the place where Lord Buddha attained enlightenment. We have the Bodhi Tree. We have 535 million Buddhists around the world. Japan, South Korea, China - they would be falling over each other to make Bodh Gaya the Vatican of the East," he said. "And yet the annual municipal budget of Bodh Gaya is less than the production budget of the failed movie Adipurush — 500 crores."

He noted, "Only 0.25 million foreign tourists visited the Bodhi Tree."

Bodh Gaya, located in Bihar, is regarded as the holiest site in Buddhism and a major center of pilgrimage for followers from around the world. It is here, under the sacred Bodhi Tree, that Prince Siddhartha attained enlightenment and became the Buddha over 2,500 years ago.

Ranganathan said India lacks even basic tourism infrastructure. "UAE has more hotel rooms than India. China has 20 million hotel rooms, we have 0.2 million hotel rooms," he stated. "Of the hotel rooms that we have, we charge 5% GST. Restaurants are charged 5%, but if in a hotel you have a restaurant that has a room as well — you charge 18%."

He added, "The hotel industry is crying out. Nobody is loaning them money. The Finance Minister has realised this...because of low return on investments nobody's giving loans to the hotel industry."

Discussing the labor gap, he said, "There is a 60% gap between the supply and demand as far as labor for tourism sector is concerned." He criticised the failure of the Skill India Mission: "The idea was to have 400 million Indians skilled by 2022. How many were skilled by 2022? Fourteen million."

He added that India has had an apprentice act since the 1960s, but "our labor force is 585 million, the number of apprentices are only 0.5 million."

"The State owns and runs 495 hotels. All of them are loss-making. The only revenue they make is during or after the elections, when they have to shuttle the politicians from one resort to the other. That’s the only time they’re occupied," he said.

"These are the low-hanging fruits-agriculture, tourism-and what is the state doing? The state is not plucking the low-hanging fruit. The state is watching it rot. And if we keep on watching it rot, how can we take off from this inflection point that we are admittedly truly right now at?"