Saarc tourists to Agra may pay less

Soon after the Union Ministry of Culture decided on refusing US dollar payments for entry tickets to monuments in Agra due to the falling value of dollar against the Indian rupee, the Archaeological Survey of India is planning to lower the entry ticket cost for tourists belonging to the South Asian Association for Regional cooperation (Saarc) countries, bringing it down from Rs 750 to Rs 20.

The move may cause the ASI and Agra Development Authority to lose about Rs 29 crore of ticket money annually at the Taj Mahal alone.

According to ASI officials at Agra, even though the ASI did not keep a record of the nationality of visitors coming to the monuments, marking them as foreign or domestic tourists alone, the number of visitors buying the 'foreigner' ticket at the Taj was quite large, amounting to about 5,000-6,000 every day.

Of these, about 20 per cent tourists were from the Saarc countries, close to 400,000 visitng the Taj and other monuments in Agra annually. These tourists were charged Rs 500 as toll tax by the ADA while the ASI charged Rs 250 as entry ticket according to the existing tariff, earning an estimated revenue of Rs 30 crore each year.

Notably, the Union Ministry of Tourism had recently announced its intentions to take steps to encourage tourism between the SAARC countries viz. Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives and the drop in ticket prices at the monuments is being seen as a part of this strategy to attract more tourists from these countries to India.

If the ticket rates are dropped to Rs 20, the collective revenue earned by the ASI and ADA at the Taj Mahal will drop to just about Rs 80 lakh, which is a clear loss of about Rs 19 crore, incurred by the ADA and another Rs 9-10 crore by the ASI for improving relations with the SAARC nations.

DN Dimri, superintending archaeologist, ASI, said the proposal has been approved by the Union Ministry of Tourism and sent to the ASI headquarters for the issuance of a notification in this regard. As soon as the notification is formally issued by the headquarters, the new ticket prices will be made formally applicable.

But the Agra Development Authority still appears to be non-committal about complying with the decision with its officials claiming that the authority was charging the toll-tax on the monuments for the development of tourism infrastructure around the Taj Mahal and it would suffer greatly if the decision was brought into effect.

Besides, the ADA ticket, once purchased, was valid on all five heritage monuments of Agra, bringing down the cost per monument to an economical point and further reduction of ticket prices will only result in a drop in the quality of civic amenities which were currently available for tourists around the Taj Mahal and other monuments, they claimed.