The Lieutenant Governor of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir must be wholeheartedly appreciated for putting in relentless efforts to uplift the tourism sector in Kashmir valley as well as in the Jammu region. Every year the footfall of tourists breaks the record of last year’s tourism footfall. This is heartening and can easily attract a lot of investment in the tourism sector in Kashmir.
At the peak of summer in the plains of India the hotels in Kashmir are witnessing full bookings till June end. This is great news for the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir and the administration led by LG Manoj Sinha deserves due accolades for that.
However, a few concerns remain. One is obviously about the high-priced tickets which goofs up the local citizens of Kashmir working outside and prevents them from visiting home on important religious festivals. This high rise in airfare has also goofed up the prospective upstart middle-class traveler from the Indian plains. This overloading by airlines has the potential to single-handedly divert this footfall to other regions of the country or even to some foreign destinations – airfares to a lot of foreign destinations is cheaper as compared to airfare to Srinagar from the main Indian cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru.
The second main concern is about the lesser number of foreign tourists. Ladakh still gets many times more number of foreign tourists as compared to Kashmir. The administration needs to be put in serious efforts to divert that tourist rush towards Kashmir. It is very much doable and the establishment has to generate a proactive innovative strategy to this end without antagonizing the tourism players in the Ladakh region.
One must again thank LG Manoj Sinha for uplifting the tourism scenario in the Kashmir valley but as stated above there is still a lot of ground to cover before we will have thousands of foreign prospective tourists prioritising Kashmir as their number one go-to place in south Asia.
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