A STUDY ON THE TOURISM INDUSTRY OF NORTH EAST INDIA WITH REFERENCE TO ITS RECENT GROWTH AND REVENUE GENERATION

This study is an attempt to analyse the recent growth of tourism in north eastern region of India based on secondary sources of time series data. In order to understand the variation of tourist inflow and the resultant revenue generation, a time period of 2005-06 to 2016-17 has been considered for the study. The study basically investigates the state wise trends and annual growth rate of domestic as well as foreign tourist's inflow across the eight north eastern states of India during the time period. The study also examined the growth rate of tourism revenue and its contributions to state GDPs across selected north eastern states of India. The findings of the study reveals that, States like Assam, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh have shown better performance in attracting more domestic as well as foreign tourists over the study period. So far as foreign tourist's inflow is concerned, Sikkim and ArunachalPradesh have attracted maximum tourists of this category. It has found that, contribution of tourism revenue to state GDPs by north eastern states is very negligible. The study clearly reveals that, Sikkim is the topmost performer in tourism in recent years. Thus, enormous potentialities of tourism industry can become a significant sector towards economic growth of north eastern region of India. Policy makers and other stakeholders are expected to get fruitful information from this study to design suitable policies in favour expansion of this industry