Barun Roy: Our islands, their islands

ASIA FILE

Indian authorities continue to distinguish domestic from foreign travellers.

Reading a recent news report that Thailand's Phuket island alone received 2.44 million tourists in the first half of 2007, about the number India used to receive in a full year until not too long ago, I was curious to know how our own Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which could have been our Phuket, were faring. I came across a September 9 Reuters report quoting officials in Port Blair who offered an atrocious piece of explanation why the Andamans were not yet the top global destination that India's tourism bosses apparently want it to be. I was even more shocked that nobody spoke up later to protest.

The officials blamed the Andamans' backwardness squarely on the "invasion" of the islands by low-budget visitors from the mainland, including "all levels of low-wage" government employees now entitled to fly on leave travel every two years. This, the officials argued, had created a service culture that's insensitive to the needs of wealthier global travellers.

Highly offensive, this argument implies that plans to make the Andamans a global tourist destination actually exist. If they do, we haven't heard of them. The whole thing might still be in the imagination of our tourism bosses who are always looking for visions and excuses not to work them into reality.

Moreover, what do they mean by invasion? According to the best available information, no more than 125,000 people visited the Andamans in 2006. This number might crawl up to 150,000 in 2007. If this is invasion, there's something fundamentally wrong in our approach to tourism. Unless a country is a Singapore or a Tuvalu, domestic tourism has to be its building block for a credible tourism industry, which then will attract foreigners. In India, we seem to have missed this point completely. We are dreaming of 10 million foreign visitors by 2010 when we don't have the infrastructure to serve even domestic tourists well.

The Andamans prove the lowly level at which Indian tourism exists. Lakshadweep confirms this fact with no more than 25,000 visiting the island last year. Yet, if properly groomed, islands can be real charmers. They have a leave-it-all-behind image that fascinates tourists, and countries big on tourism are big on islands too, if they have one. Phuket has become synonymous with the very idea of a Thai vacation and almost one in every three foreigners who visit Thailand visit the island as well.

The island recovered remarkably quickly from the devastations of the tsunami of December, 2004 and received 4.7 million tourists last year. The prediction for this year is 5.2 million, of which "" mark this "" more than one fourth are likely to be domestic visitors.

Malaysia is pushing its two famous islands, Penang and Langkawi, to an even bigger role in further developing its tourism industry. Langkawi, in particular, is receiving a whole lot of attention and is being promoted as the "ultimate green fun in the sun" resort. In the first four months of this year alone, more than 680,000 visitors descended on Langkawi, which already has a tally of 100 hotels, some with excellent conference facilities. "We want to make Langkawi Malaysia's foremost tourist destination," says Tourism Minister Datuk Seri Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor.

Even though Bali was down after the tsunami, it's back in stride and received 1.29 million tourists in the first nine months of 2007. Sipadan, off the coast of Sabah, just about 12 hectares in size and surrounded by 24 hectares of coral reefs, is so popular among the global diving community "" it's one of the top five diving havens in the world "" that the government had to rein in the arrival of tourists to protect its fragile marine ecology. Still, it received most of the more than two million tourists who visited Sabah in 2006. Boracay, the fabled Philippine island of palm-fringed white-sand beaches, drew 510,232 visitors last year, of which 321,014 were domestic tourists. It's now gearing up to receive a million tourists by 2010. Even Batam, an industrial island near Singapore, hosted about a million tourists in 2006 from within the region and elsewhere.

I don't know if New Delhi is serious about developing the Andamans for tourism. However, if that's even a distant ambition, it should remember that global destinations can't simply be wished into existence, and blaming low-budget domestic travellers is not the way to go about it. On the contrary, it's domestic travellers who drive the tourist machine in all countries that don't distinguish between domestic and foreign. One would have thought that India, with a domestic tourist market currently believed to be as big as 367 million, would be speeding way ahead of many of its rivals. Instead, it has only been sputtering along, producing more smoke than motion, in a largely futile race.