EMERGING TRENDS IN TOURISM SECTOR IN INDIA- A COMPARATIVE OUTLOOK

Tourism has emerged as a major global industry today. It is a sizable but complex service industry. In the last 50-55 years, tourism has seen rapid and continuous growth. Tourism is a key sector earning foreign exchange for Indian economy. It is working as a harbinger of 'more inclusive growth' in India by promoting other industries inside the economy through backward and forward linkages and generating employment in various sectors such as hospitality, travel, and entertainment. The significance of tourism has been recognized in both developed and developing countries. This sector has emerged as Travel Tourism and Hospitality Industry contributing considerably towards India’s GDP and expected to increase from 234.03 US billion$ in 2017 to 492.21 US billion $ in 2028. India offers geographical diversity, attractive tourist destinations, 37 world Heritage sites, 29 Cultural sites and 25 biogeographic zones. It has emerged with diverse portfolio of niche tourism products like cruise, adventure, medical, and wellness, sports, eco-tourism, film, rural and religious tourism. This sector directly supported 5% of the total employment and expected to touch the figure of 8.4 % of total employment by 2028. Although tourism sector has emerged as growth engine and is having vast potential for generating employment and earning huge amounts of foreign exchange besides giving a fillip to the country’s economic and social development. But much more needs to be done to make India as world player in this sector. Although this sector has adopted aggressive marketing strategies and launched number of creative and attractive tourism products but still it needs to be strengthened by focusing on positive growth in terms of Foreign tourist arrivals, Foreign exchange earnings and foreign as well as domestic investments. Present paper is an attempt to focus on the emerging trends of this sector in India with and to evaluate the trends of foreign direct investments, domestic investments foreign exchange earnings , foreign tourist arrival with its comparative outlook