According to a PIB release, the Ministry of Tourism (MoT) has estimated a total of 5.37 million Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) for 2008. Following are the important highlights of country-wise FTAs in India during 2008.
As far as different regions of the world are concerned, maximum growth in 2008 over 2007 was observed for West Asia (20.9 per cent) followed by Eastern Europe (18.5 per cent), Central and South America (12.7 per cent) and South East Asia (10.5 per cent). The growth rate in 2008 was lower than the all-India growth rate of 5.6 per cent in the FTAs from North America (4.4 per cent), East Asia (3.6 per cent), Western Europe (2.9 per cent) and Africa (2.7 per cent).
The top ten countries for FTAs in India during 2008 were USA (8,27,866), UK (7,87,197), Bangladesh (5,40,092), Sri Lanka (2,28,548), Canada (2,23,587), France (2,17,816), Germany (2,09,252), Japan (1,50,732), Australia (1,48,055) and Malaysia (1,19,040). FTAs from these ten countries constituted about 64.34 per cent of total FTAs in India during 2008.
The maximum growth rate in FTAs was observed for Oman (54.9 per cent) |