India's tourism target is reachable if we try hard

India aims to attract 100 million foreign visitors annually by 2047, more than 10 times last year's count. What must we do to bring this eye-popping visitor target within realistic reach?

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It is a welcome development that the government is drawing up a plan to develop 100 tourism centres in the country and promote India as a tourist destination across the world. The reality is that India probably has more to offer a tourist from abroad than almost any other country, thanks to its size, antiquity and sheer diversity of culture, including cuisine, and rich collection of monuments built in different centuries. The big challenge is not the marketing of India's tourist delights, but preparing people and the local infrastructure to make the visitor's experience a matter of delight rather than regret. This calls for challenging some deep-rooted cultural norms and stereotypes, as well as behavioural patterns, and that is far more demanding a task than constructing roads, places to stay, airports and civic amenities. But if India does manage to meet these challenges, the prize would be remarkable. Such is the country's tourism potential that we would not just gain a larger share of the world's $1.5 trillion tourism receipts (2023 figure from UN Touris