With the vacationer sector contributing 7 per cent to Jammu and Kashmir’s general gross state home product, the state was banking large on tourism within the coming years, pegging hopes on years of relative peace to grasp the area’s potential.
The time period “tourism” featured as many as 27 instances in Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s March 7 Price range speech for 2025-26, when he went on to declare that his authorities’s purpose was to extend the sector’s contribution to J&Ok’s GSDP from 7 per cent to at the very least 15 per cent over the following 4 to 5 years because the state launched into a “transformational journey to changing into a world tourism powerhouse”.
The phobia assault in Pahalgam and the following closure of 49 outstanding vacationer locations have dashed these hopes.
The J&Ok Financial Survey for FY25 had pegged the nominal GSDP at Rs 2.65 lakh crore and the true GSDP at Rs 1.45 lakh crore. At 7 per cent of GSDP, the scale of J&Ok’s tourism sector involves Rs 18,550 crore in nominal phrases and Rs 10,150 crore in actual phrases.
For neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, too, tourism accounts for practically 8 per cent of the hill state’s GSDP. In that context, J&Ok’s purpose to greater than double tourism’s share in its GSDP inside 5 years was an bold goal.
For FY26, the J&Ok authorities earmarked Rs 390.2 crore as capital expenditure on the tourism sector, a rise of Rs 121.8 crore over the revised estimate for FY25. When it comes to earnings by the UT’s authorities immediately from tourism – along with all the opposite financial and socio-economic advantages the sector dropped at J&Ok – its current Price range pegged the non-tax income from tourism for FY25 at Rs 50 crore, with a Rs 100-crore projection for FY26.
To supply a fillip to tourism, the J&Ok administration rolled out a complete coverage in 2020, which aimed to generate employment for roughly 50,000 folks per yr and entice investments of Rs 2,000 crore a yr.
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For the reason that pandemic ebbed, vacationer arrivals in J&Ok have been rising steadily. In 2024, a document 2.36 crore vacationers visited the UT, a rise of 11.4 per cent over 2023, as per knowledge from the J&Ok tourism division quoted within the UT’s Financial Survey for 2024-25 (FY25). Of those 2.36 crore vacationers, practically 35 lakh visited the Kashmir Valley, 10.9 per cent increased than the earlier yr. In 2022, 1.89 crore vacationers visited J&Ok, with the variety of guests to the Valley alone at 26.7 lakh. Notably, the variety of international vacationers visiting J&Ok greater than tripled to over 65,000 in 2024 from round 20,000 in 2022.
The surge in vacationer arrivals is starker when in comparison with the pre-pandemic interval. In accordance with knowledge from the J&Ok tourism division, in 2018, the yr earlier than the revocation of Article 370 and the following clampdown, over 1.6 crore vacationers visited J&Ok. Of this, 8.3 lakh visited Kashmir. This quantity dropped to simply 5.65 lakh (Kashmir) in 2019 owing to the lockdown and communication blockade within the Valley.
The previous few years additionally noticed Indian airways launching new flights to Srinagar from numerous factors within the nation. Airways’ schedule knowledge from aviation analytics firm Cirium reveals that in April-June of the present yr, Indian carriers have been scheduled to function over 4,300 flights to Srinagar from numerous Indian cities, a rise of practically 12 per cent over the corresponding interval of final yr, and 21 per cent over April-June of 2023. Within the April-June quarter of 2018, there have been simply round 2,200 flights to Srinagar from throughout India.
Tourism was additionally changing into a key driver of financial exercise in J&Ok, resulting in increased employment within the hospitality and transportation sectors, along with spurring financial exercise in different associated companies sectors of the UT’s economic system.
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“The service sector is comparatively rising at a quicker charge and has exceptional development potential. Inside this sector, tourism could make a major contribution, and there’s a substantial potential for tourism improvement, leveraging Jammu & Kashmir’s pure magnificence and cultural heritage, which might create quite a few jobs and spur financial development,” the UT’s Financial Survey for FY25 had famous.