Names of airports not released by Jaitley.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW DELHI: Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has proposed a measure that will make it easier for tourists coming to India to obtain a visa-on-arrival, part of the 2014 budget presentation he made on Thursday.
The proposal states that Electronic Travel Authorization visas, more commonly known as e-visas, will be made available at 9 airports across the country. Jaitley said that the timeline on this would be as short as six months, and that by early 2015, each of these 9 airports can be equipped with the infrastructure necessary to make the e-visa proposal a reality.
The reason for this is to incentivize tourism to India, a industry that India apparently does not believe it is exploiting to its fullest. Unsurprisingly, those in the tourism sector lauded the move, and hope to continue to upward trend that current numbers have shown for subcontinent-bound tourism.
The total number of tourists visiting India has gone up 16% in the last five years, reports The Economic Times, and is expected to go up by another 12% by 2020. Those numbers equate to hundreds of millions of people in total, and can generate millions of jobs within India. Last year alone, tourism accounted for a staggering Rs. 63,160 crore of economic input, and all signs point to that number going even higher.
That India’s new BJP-led government, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the helm, is hearing and reportedly supports the measure is not a shock. Modi has made no secret of his intent to open India up to foreigners as a way to increase the country’s commercial and financial prospects. Adding thousands of crores to the economy through tourism is exactly what Modi wants.
The specific airports that would be involved with this proposal were not named, but it stands to reason that air travel hubs in India’s biggest cities – New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune, and Kochi, among others – will be included in this program.