The descent of India

Popular holiday destinations are deteriorating fast

The annual summer and autumn vacation season provides a stark reminder of India’s growing prosperity as the standard holiday destinations burst at the seams with families who can afford the luxuries of leisure travel. The numbers underline the trend. At the start of the new century, some 220 million domestic tourists partook of the delights of India’s holiday hotspots, tourism ministry data say. By 2015, the number had burgeoned to 1.4 billion. The visible upside of this surge in domestic tourism has been the expansion of the job-intensive hospitality sector, with all its multiplier effects. Increasingly, however, it is the