India’s next tourism opportunity is jobs

This article is authored by Hemant Joshi, CEO, Atithi Foundation.

As the world marks World Tourism Day, it is worth asking whether India is looking at tourism through the right lens. We tend to see tourism as a source of visitors, foreign exchange and economic activity. We should see it as one of our most powerful engines of employment, and that should be the prominent lens.

Tourism

The latest official estimates put tourism employment in India at 8.46 crore direct and indirect jobs in 2023-24, or 13.34% of total employment. Tourism accounted for 5.22% of GDP, with employment rising from 7.59 crore in 2018-19 to 8.46 crore. These are not marginal numbers. Yet tourism is still largely discussed as an industry of holidays, hotels and leisure, rather than as one of the country’s significant employment engines. That needs to change. Tourism cannot create all the millions of productive livelihoods India will need over the next two decades, but few sectors can combine India’s natural and cultural assets with the ability to create work across cities, smaller towns and rural areas, and across a wide range of skills. A hotel creates jobs, but so does a guide, driver, restaurant, homestay, craftsperson, performer, boat operator, food producer or local experience provider. Tourism is also relatively employment-intensive - a Parliamentary Standing Committee cited an estimate of 78 jobs created for every ₹10 lakh invested in tourism, compared with 45 in manufacturing. Much of this employment can be created close to where the tourist actually spends money.

Other countries are beginning to see tourism in these terms. Saudi Arabia’s revised National Tourism Strategy, for instance, has an explicit objective of creating 1.6 million job opportunities by 2030 alongside visitor and economic targets. India need not replicate that model. The useful lesson is that employment can be treated as an explicit tourism outcome rather than something that happens incidentally after tourists arrive.

India has already begun moving in this direction, but the pieces are not sufficiently connected. The ministry of tourism’s Destination Based Skill Development programme has trained around 12,187 people across 145 destinations. The problem is not that India has no tourism-skilling programmes. It is that we often train people first and ask later where the jobs will come from. The sequence needs to be reversed--destination demand, then business opportunity, then job requirement, then training and placement. Consider a destination that wants visitors to stay three nights rather than one. It first needs to identify what will persuade them to stay--heritage walks, evening performances, food trails, cycling, wildlife excursions, craft workshops or other local experiences. Those experiences create demand for guides, performers, drivers, cooks, artisans, hosts and small tourism businesses. Training can then be designed around those actual jobs rather than a generic hospitality curriculum.

This leads to a simple proposition--every priority tourism destination should have a tourism jobs plan. Not another mission, committee or government structure. Just a requirement that every significant destination investment answer five questions--one, how many additional visitors are expected; two, how much additional visitor spending could result; three, how many direct and indirect jobs could be created; four, which local people could fill those jobs; and five, what businesses need to emerge for those jobs to exist.

That framework should drive five practical changes. First, link destination development to employment outcomes--every major tourism investment should estimate the jobs it can create and the local businesses needed to support them. Second, reverse the sequence of skilling - identify the jobs first, then train and place people against them, measuring employment rather than simply people trained. Third, make it easier for small tourism businesses to emerge, including homestays, local transport, guides, food businesses, cultural experiences, adventure activities, crafts and wellness, with a destination-level mechanism helping with permissions, finance, digital onboarding and market access. Fourth, measure how much of the tourist’s spending stays locally. Ten lakh tourists do not have the same employment impact if most of their money goes to a narrow set of large operators rather than across local businesses. Fifth, make employment a standard measure of public tourism investment. If ₹100 crore is invested in a destination, the question should not stop at how many visitors it might attract, but also how much additional visitor spending it can generate, how many local businesses that spending can support and how many jobs can result.

Kerala offers an instructive Indian example. Its Responsible Tourism Mission has deliberately connected local people and enterprises to tourism, while its women-friendly tourism initiative had attracted more than 17,600 women into the industry by 2025. The lesson is not that every state should copy Kerala. It is that local employment can be deliberately designed into tourism rather than left to chance.

None of this requires another tourism jobs mission. It requires a change in how existing tourism schemes, destination investments, skilling programmes and business-support mechanisms are designed and measured.

Tourism cannot solve India’s employment challenge alone. But few sectors can turn India’s culture, nature, heritage and entrepreneurial energy into economic activity in so many places and at so many levels of skill. The opportunity is to turn tourism from an industry we primarily promote into an economic engine we deliberately organise around - creating more businesses, more local income and more productive livelihoods wherever visitors travel.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Hemant Joshi, CEO, Atithi Foundation.