By: Manoj Gursahani
Rejuvenate your body with the healing touch of Yoga, take a dip in the holy waters of the Ganges, or simply absorb yourself in the colourful Pushkar Mela. Changing the country’s image from that of a land of snake charmers, the Government of India is now looking to promote India as the land of spirituality.
Tourism Ministry of India has been wooing the overseas market for a long time with pilgrimages to the ancient spiritual destinations, resulting in tourists pouring in from all over the world- America, Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia. During 2005, an estimated 3.92 million foreign tourists visited India generating foreign exchange earnings upto $5.7billion. Keeping an eye on Asia's vast globetrotting Buddhist communities, the new buzzword for Government of India is ‘Buddhist Tourism’.
Even today, Buddhism is still a major force in East Asia- in Thailand, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia and so on, with about a billion Buddhists worldwide. However the significance of the ancient Buddhism in India has slowly faded out, despite of existence of monuments and locales associated with Buddhism, in cities and towns spread across the length and breadth of the country.
These holy sites include Buddhism's most sacred shrine, the Mahabodi temple in Bodhgaya town in Bihar, where Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment 2,500 years ago, and is today a UNESCO World Heritage site.
In past 50 years, India has failed to promote these Buddhist sites, with even foreign funds remaining under-utilised. Tourists do not visit these holy sites in India due to lack of infrastructure, and amenities and services of decent standards, which is reflected in the fact that the inbound foreign tourists to Bihar in 2005 generated no more than Rs 75 Lakh.
Having already spent 20.5 million dollars between the Eighth and Tenth Five-Year Plans on beautifying existing sites, the Government of India has now decided to pump in more financial assistance to develop tourism infrastructure at these sites.
Buddhist tourist circuit, partly funded by Japan, is being mapped across 16 Indian states with Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh as the major hubs. Three circuits in Uttar Pradesh; Lucknow-Awadh, Agra-Braj and Varanasi-Vindhya, have been identified for the first phase of the project.
Realising the potential to attract large number of overseas Buddhist pilgrims, the Tourism Ministry of India, has decided to upgrade these ancient sites as tourism spots and encourage more tourists to visit the Buddhist circuit as part of ‘spiritual tourism’ for Buddhists around the world.
India is a land of multi-religious spirituality and people have been known to travel here to find solace since ancient times. By developing the Buddhist Tourism in India, Government of India is opening doors to the plethora of tourists, to the place where prince Siddhartha Gautam attained enlightenment to become Buddha.
