God’s own country loses its sheen

Kerala Tourism seems to suffer the fate of a celebrated arthouse production. Its products and promotion materials have won more national and international awards than any other destination in the country but, like any highbrow movie, it doesn’t seem to attract enough visitors.

Kerala is not even among the top ten Indian states preferred by domestic tourists, and is ranked a lowly seventh when it comes to foreign tourist arrivals to the country. And, long before the liquor ban was put in place, even the small number that was coming to the state had begun to dwindle dangerously.

It could be the diminishing returns. Except for its original offering of beaches, hills, backwaters and ayurveda, Kerala has not thought up a single new product in the last two decades. We have not bothered to protect our assets either. Critics point out vast difference between image and reality; the Kerala on promotional materials is said to be shockingly alien to the real experience.

“Take backwaters, for instance. What looks more exotic than the canals of Venice on glossy ads turns out to be a virtual drainage cruise. Though you have declared Kumarakom to be plastic-free, the supposedly serene backwaters are tumultuous with waste and pollution” said Derek Whitehall, who will be part of a South African delegation to the Kerala Travel Mart (KTM 2016). “Even Responsible Tourism, which is the theme of KTM 2016, seems to exist only on paper,” he said.

Mr Whitehall is technically off the mark. RT is over a decade old in the state and has been implemented in seven destinations: Kovalam, Kumarakom, Thekkady, Kumbalangi, Bekal, Vythiri and Ambalavayal. However, except in Kumarakom, the experiment has not been a roaring success. The idea was to share the gains of tourism with the local population, which would have been possible only if the tourism industry sourced their requirements from the local community. As on date, the industry has generally turned its back on the RT movement.

Therefore when KTM 2016, powered mainly by the tourism industry in the state, adopted Responsible Tourism as its main theme, it provoked suspicions. Will it be just lip service “I would say the industry was not adequately supportive of RT,” said tourism principal secretary Dr V. Venu, the brain behind the RT movement in the state. “Now I can sense a positive change, the initiative is coming from the side of the industry itself,” he said.

But it is still not clear whether the industry approves the kind of RT sought to be promoted by the state. There are private RT initiatives that are completely at odds with the official RT movement. For instance, there are resorts that employ Bengali and Tamil migrants, instead of local men, to work as guides or display traditional skills like ‘kalari’ and still call themselves ‘responsible”.

It is also alleged that the man leading the seminar on RT at KTM is a resort owner who had not purchased even a single bottle of pickle from a local Kudumbashree unit. “This hugely successful owner doubles up as guide and driver to his guests and brands his activity responsible tourism,” a top source said. “If profit is the sole motive, RT movement cannot be taken forward,” the source said.

As if these confusions were not enough, there are also attempts to simplify the crisis in the tourism sector. Liquor ban has been identified as the virus in the system. “We have not done any scientific study to establish the link between tourism growth and liquor availability,” tourism minister A. C. Moideen said. “However, we conducted a study called Trade Research Survey 2016 that had found liquor ban to be the primary cause for the crisis,” he said. Fact is, tourism growth that had consistently been over 20 percent had fallen below 10 percent since 2010.

“A major reason for the decline of tourism in the State is poor public investment,” said D. Narayana, the director of Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation who had done a study on the economic crisis in the state. “Poor investment in connectivity has led to a situation where it is difficult to reach these destinations. Investments in destinations too are poor. Infrastructure and connectivity master plans are a must if tourism has to grow,” he said.