With just days to go before the tourism season 2015-16 officially opens, the news that Singapore and Bangalore have edged out Goa from the list of favoured holiday destinations for Indian tourists is not good news for the industry. The last season saw cancellations of charter flights and falling numbers of foreign tourists and what kept many hotels and restaurants afloat were the Indian tourists that came in large numbers. If these too cold shoulder the beaches of Goa, then there is little hope to bolster the fate of the industry this season. So World Tourism Day on Sunday should have been a time for reflection of what went wrong in the past and how it can be righted so that the ensuing season is not washed off by even fewer numbers.
But that didn’t happen. While the industry constantly complains of low tourist arrivals, the government proffers figures of tourists in Goa showing a graph that is always rising. For Goa Tourism, officially, there is no decline in arrivals. That is perhaps how the Tourism Department and the Goa Tourism Development Corporation avoid facing the reality of the situation and shelter themselves from criticism. This, far from being the best response to the situation, is the worst possible response that can be coming from the government. Even a rookie manager knows that he has to admit there is a problem and then tackle it before it snowballs into a crisis. Goa Tourism is not doing that, simply because those at the helm are not of management calibre but mere minions who do not have the long-term interests of the State as their concern. Unless the Tourism Department and the Goa Tourism Development Corporation face the facts, accept them and then work from this point, the situation will not and cannot change.
The Goa government has been living off the revenues it earns from the tourism industry, yet there is little that has been done to ensure that the industry is sustainable and survives through the years. Tourism is the most fickle of industries, and various other destinations across the world that were once on the top of the most-favoured list have over the years fallen behind. This is an industry that has to be nurtured, but somehow this has never happened in Goa.
Tourism has grown despite the government’s unconcern show to its development. Tourism is not just having hotels and restaurants. It is also not about ministerial and department officials making regular promotion trips abroad to sell Goa. What is required is proper management of the assets, and the assets that Goa has been selling is the beaches. Yet, the government finds it difficult to keep its beaches clean and free of glass pieces. Most of the beaches do not have a proper access and the narrow pot-holed roads are nothing other than bottlenecks that serve to delay the journey to the beach.
Take the case of Calangute and Candolim, while the former has a proper access and some parking, the only access to the latter is through narrow roads. The scenario repeats with Colva and Benaulim with Colva having ample parking space, though the road leading to the beach is narrow and Benaulim with a road that is hardly a few metres wide. The fact that the accesses to Calangute and Colva were built during the Portuguese period are telling of the kind of development that the various governments post-1961 undertook where tourism is concerned.
There are lessons to be learnt which the government never will. Year after year the shack operators await licences to set up their restaurants on the beach. The licences are always delayed. This year, the government had promised to allot shack licences before October so that the temporary eateries would be up on the beaches by October 1. It didn’t happen. That’s the story of Goa Tourism – promises galore, action scant. It continues season following season, with no change to the tale.
