Agencies
Ahmedabad, May 28
North-eastern state Assam is taking a leaf out of Gujarat’s popular marketing blitzkrieg ‘Khushboo Gujarat Ki’ and is all set to rev up its tourism sector by taking up several initiatives on similar lines in a bid to double its tourist numbers.Known for being the home to the rare one-horned rhino, domestic inbound tourist flows to Assam during 2014-15 stood at 45,00,000 while overseas tourist flow was at 25,000. Ashutosh Agnihotri, IAS, Commissioner & Secretary, Tourism Department, Government of Assam who kicked off a series of tourism roadshows from Ahmedabad on Thursday said that the image of ‘disturbed region’ dented Assam’s tourism sector in the last ten years but things were slowly changing. Speaking on lessons learnt from Gujarat Tourism’s Khushboo Gujarat Ki campaign featuring Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, he said, “We have learnt that professional marketing helps. We will be engaging a professional branding agency by and will also finalise a brand ambassador for the state’s tourism campaign by June like Gujarat. Most insurgency groups from state have come on board and given up arms. There is a propensity of Gujaratis to travel and in the last ten years the perception of Assam has changed a lot. Assam is not all disturbed’ and the situation there has changed.There are close to 800 major and 60,000 small tea estates spread across 300,000 hectares in Assam employing 17 per cent of the state’s workforce and we are developing a few government properties for tourists as well. We also plant to reach out to the film industry so they can shoot in Assam.”
While Agnihotri met with N. Srivastava (IFS), MD of Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Ltd (TCGL) during his visit to the city, he added, “From the year 2000 where tourist numbers stood at 10 lakhs, it has increased to 45 lakhs currently and we are looking to double this in next two years. We get maximum tourists from West Bengal and here in Gujarat where we got roughly around 5 lakh tourists (15 %) last year. We will soon launch our interactive portal that will give all information to tourists who can book tour packages online. Seeing a steady growth rate of 15 % in tourist footfall, we have increased the budgetary allocation and set aside Rs 11-15 crores for tourism promotion this year.
Our travel products range from tea, golf, river, adventure, wild-life and religious tourism. Till now the state remained focussed on the ‘one horned rhino’ but the swelling numbers of our tiger populations shows that it is a successful conservation story as well.”
