Kerala: Planning Board cuts tourist forecast

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Planning Board has contradicted the tourism department’s ‘rising’ foreign arrival projections. The board has employed a methodology based on per capita GDP of EU countries, which pegs arrivals lower than the figures touted by the department. It estimates that foreign arrivals will touch 3 million by 2020. “The department estimate is based on an annual growth rate of 15 per cent per annum, which far exceeds our projections,” a top board official said.

The department’s figure seems to have been evolved in perfect conditions, a sterilised scenario that ignores global economic crises. The board’s methodology demonstrates that economic uph-eavals badly affect arrivals. It shows that a one per cent increase/decline of Euro area’s per capita GDP leads to 3.3 per cent increase/decline in the visit of foreign tourists to Kerala.

Going by this equation, foreign arrivals should have come down drastically rather than gone up as claimed by the department. Countries like UK, USA and Canada, from where Kerala gets the bulk of its foreign arrivals, have still not come out of the financial crisis. The growth in Kerala’s tourist flow remains consistently lower than the national average growth, the board official said.

According to the board, the reason for the state’s disappointing tourism performance is the scarcity of innovative products and services. “The economy is dominated by ‘low knowledge’ and ‘low technology’- intensive tourism by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). These are unstable and income-elastic and will drown in a competitive atmosphere,” the official said.