JAIPUR: The new year has brought new hope for Rajasthan's tourism industry which was badly crippling by the corona crisis.
Tourism in the state, which employs nearly 15% people in the state, has seen a massive slump for the past nine months due to Covid fears. But the new year season is witnessing tourists flocking to several sites across the state. In Jaipur alone, over 20,000 tourists visited different places on the first day of 2021.
Famous as the Pink City, Jaipur is a part of the Golden Triangle of Indian tourism along with Delhi and Agra. With foreign and domestic tourists all around, the last day of 2020 saw 15,000 tourists visiting Jaipur’s top sites and on January 1, over 20,000 tourists flocked to six major sites including the famous Amber and Nahargarh forts. Most tourists were seen with cameras in their hands and masks on their faces as they captured the historic delights of the Pink City.
On the first day of the new year, the Hawa Mahal was decorated with colourful Rangolis to welcome tourists. At the Amber Fort, the decked up elephants, which give joy rides to people, gave a special salute with their trunks to tourists. The Pink City is home to over a hundred elephants who mostly live in the Elephant Village close to the Amber Fort. For centuries, these elephants have been a part of Jaipur’s royal history and in recent decades, elephant rides at the historic Fort have been a prime tourist attraction. Due to the pandemic, the elephant rides had come to a virtual halt for most of 2020.
Now, as tourists have returned after a nine-month-long gap, the elephant owners are excited. As Ballu Khan, the President of the Haathi Gaon Vikas Samiti happily remarked, “After huge suffering in the past year, we are delighted by the tourists coming. We hope this momentum will continue all through January. Schools are shut and lots of tourists have come from Delhi, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad. Our elephants are again busy giving rides to tourists. This is a great beginning to the new year, we hope it continues.”
On January 1, while the Amber Fort saw 5,960 tourists, Nahargrah fort saw 4851, the Jantar Mantar attracted 3069, and another 2189 tourists visited the Albert Hall Museum.
Jaisalmer, Udaipur, and Ranthambore also saw a heavy footfall of tourists over the Christmas-New Year period. While the number of foreign tourists is still rather limited, domestic tourists are flocking to various sites in Rajasthan and have brought smiles to the faces of hoteliers, guides and all those involved with the tourism industry.
While the majority of the visitors are domestic and only a few from abroad, the travel industry is thrilled. Sanjay Kaushik of Rajputana Tourism said: "Most people coming now are domestic tourists but the trend is very encouraging. We are hoping that by April, foreign tourists will come in large numbers and that may bring normalcy after the gloom.”
The director of the state’s archaeology department Prakash Chand Sharma said, “Tourists are likely to flock to all major sites for at least another week. We are seeing a daily rise in the number of arrivals and this is good news for Rajasthan’s tourism industry.”