By Gaurav Aggarwal,
Hon’ble Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s proposal to augment the road infrastructure by building 8,500 km of highways by the next financial year will ensure better connectivity to smaller towns and villages. With the radical shift in people’s travel choices this year and the subsequent return of the road trips, investment in highway construction is surely an encouraging move and will provide key support to the travel and tourism sector in the upcoming years.
Furthermore, the introduction of the vehicle scrapping policy in order to phase out the older and unfit vehicles is an excellent initiative. It is not only an environment-friendly move towards creating a clean and green India, but will significantly help vehicle owners by ensuring efficient fuel consumption and low operating costs.
While the FM addressed the highway infrastructure providing some relief to the travel sector, it was quite surprising that the tourism and hospitality sector could not find a place in Hon'ble Finance Minister’s union budget. With the speculations of international travel remaining largely inaccessible during the majority of 2021, we are fairly optimistic about the domestic travel boom this year. In order to spur domestic tourism and make India a world-class tourist destination, we expected that the budgetary allocation would be at least increased by 50% to 2250 crore in this budget. Given that the industry is one of the largest revenue and employment generators contributing to nearly 10% of the country’s GDP, the tourism and hospitality industry are still awaiting favourable news.
With the nation battling against COVID-19, the FM’s announcement for the pandemic vaccination fund was an exceedingly optimistic news. As a larger fraction of the population gets vaccinated, people will slowly return to their pre-pandemic lives. As normalcy is restored, it will ultimately impact and boost the various crippled industries in the country including travel and tourism.
(The author is Founder & CEO of Savaari Car Rentals)