Indian Domestic Tourism is on the rise and as per Government stats, it rose a decent 19.87 percent in 2012 over previous year. The growth rate in 2011 was 15.6 percent year on year.
The total number of domestic tourist visits to various states and union territories in India was 1036 million in 2012, as compared to 865 million in 2011 and 748 million in 2010.
Domestic Tourist Visits
Andhra Pradesh was leading state for domestic tourist visits with 206.8 million Indians visiting followed by Tamil Nadu which got 184.1 million visits throughout 2012.
Here are the Top 10 states for Domestic Tourist Visits
I am not too sure about how these official figures are arrives, however, I am quite surprised that one of the most popular Tourist states in India, Himachal Pradesh, does not make a appearance in Top 10 most visited states by Indians. And though, Himachal Pradesh does not show up, state of Uttarkhand was 8th most popular state in 2012.
The Top 10 states contributed to 84.5 percent of total Domestic Visits.
Interestingly, the top 3 states of 2011 were same, but were ranked differently. Uttar Pradesh was top ranked state followed by Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in 3rd place.
Foreign Tourist Visits
While domestic visits grew by about 20 percent in 2012, Foreign visits registered a moderate growth of 6.33 percent. This number was also below the growth rate of 8.9 percent which was registered in previous year (2011).
20.7 million Foreigners visited various states in India in 2012 as compared to 19.5 million in 2011 and 17.9 million in 2010.
Here are Top 10 Indian states which registered maximum Foreign Visits.
Given that Maharashtra has India’s financial capital Mumbai, it is not surprising that nearly 25 percent (5.1 million visits out of 20.7 million) of all foreign visits were made to Maharashtra.
Tamil Nadu (3.6 mln) and Delhi (2.3 mln) were the other 2 territories that attracted most foreign visits.
There were 2 surprising factors for me in foreign visit numbers – Karnataka, which has Bangalore accounted for only 0.6 percent visitors. Given that Bangalore is India’s top tech hub and most of the companies housed there are software export companies, it is quite surprising that Karnataka has such low foreign visitors.
On the other hand, Bihar which not generally does not interest too many foreign visits had more foreign visits (1.1 Mln) than Karnataka.
While looking at Domestic as well as Foreign visits, one needs to take these numbers into consideration with a pinch of salt. Many of the actual visits do not get registered and hence do not reflect in the above numbers. We also do not have any elaboration on how these figures were collated!
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Can’t believe, there is no Kerala in the list.
The stats are encouraging !
G Kumar
http://www.cricketastro.com
That is one shocker of a report! Feels good to see Andhra Pradesh top the list but it is unbelievable looking at the ground reality! Tirupati draws about 30 million tourists every year but that is about 15% of the total. Hyderabad may be getting a larger share but still is seems a huge number :D Makes me doubt the numbers were arrived by PIB based on IRCTC bookings ;) Or the Union Tourism minister being from AP making some impact :P
Delhi, Mumbai & Chennai draw majority of Foreign Tourists, so Maharashtra>Tamil Nadu>Delhi makes sense. That followed by UP again goes haywire. Difficult to make full sense of this report.