An interactive session was recently organised by CII, Eastern Region in association with the West Bengal Tourism Development Corporation (WBTDC) to focus on promoting tourism in the state. Speaking at the session, Manabendra Mukherjee, Minister-in-charge for Tourism, Textiles, Micro & Small-scale Enterprises, West Bengal said that the state government has been encouraging Public Private Partnership (PPP) model in tourism infrastructure development for quite some time and it now intends to extend this request of partnership to private players in the publicity field as well, given that the biggest obstacle to Bengal tourism continues to be a negative perception in tourists’ minds.
Mukherjee added that in the last two years, the budget allocation for publicity of Bengal’s tourism had increased ten-fold and the state government is keen to double that in the coming days. As per a report in Economic Times, according to Mukherjee, though the state received about 11 lakh foreign tourists and 165 lakh domestic travellers in 2007-08, there is still a lot of further scope. |