Global tourism is taking flight again. With the pandemic waning, reports about airport chaos have surfaced in the US and Europe, confirming an abrupt rise in international air travel even as hard data on tourist arrivals are only trickling in.
This extraordinary travel boom, propelled by over two years of Covid uncertainty, will likely last longer, according to experts and officials. So it would be natural for Indian tourism to hope to ride this wave by coining a new slogan or two, or
packaging a handful of tried and trusted destinations for a travel-hungry global audience.
What is unusual though is that this time, the Government of India (GoI) has picked a niche: it is now focusing more on medical tourism, a segment valued at $60-80 billion globally. This figure is based on an estimate of about 14 million medical tourists who cross the borders every year, according to a strategy paper published by India’s tourism ministry in January. The size and scale of wellness
tourism is even larger — about $639 billion, according to estimates of Global Wellness Institute in 2017 as quoted in the same paper.
With this backdrop, GoI has been putting finishing touches to a series of strategic moves. One, it has been streamlining Medical Value Travel (MVT), a segment that attracted 0.7 million foreign tourists in pre-pandemic 2019. Two, it has been gearing up to formally launch a “Heal in India” project with a separate logo to promote it globally. Significantly, the tourism ministry has failed to coin any popular tagline since the launch of “Incredible India” in 2002. And three, the new policy is
designed also to widen the definition of medical tourism in India as it proposes to bring in wellness — for instance segments such as Ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy — into its ambit.
“The Union health ministry has been driving the Heal in India initiative. Other stakeholders include ministries of tourism, civil aviation, commerce, Ayush (a ministry for traditional medicines) as well as some state governments and hospitals,” says an Ayush ministry official, adding that the Union home ministry has been finalising a separate Ayush visa…..Readmore