India hopeful of greater FDI flow from China in tourism sector

NEW DELHI: Having opened up its tourism sector to 100 per cent FDI, India today expressed hope of strengthening ties with China with increased flow of investment in this sector from the neighbouring nation.

"Now that Hotels and Tourism sector has been opened for Foreign Direct Investment up to 100 per cent on automatic routes, Chinese investment in tourism infrastructure in India could be one of the major areas of cooperation," a government statement said after a bilateral meeting between tourism officials of the two nations here.

At the meeting between Zhu Shanzhong, Vice Chairman of China National Tourism Administration and Girish Shankar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Tourism here, both the nations have expressed their willingness to strengthen bilateral tourism cooperation.

The two sides have decided that "tour operators and travel agents of both the countries may interact with each other in order to promote two way tourism between India and China."

"The possibilities for promoting more package tours in either of the countries could also be explored by the travel trade of the two countries. Both the countries would like to exchange relevant information/statistics with regard to tourist arrivals, targets and projection, infrastructure facilities, etc," the Tourism Ministry release said.

It may be recalled that a MoU was signed on December 08, 2002 between the Ministry of Tourism and Chinese National Tourism Administration on the implementation plan for organised group travel by Chinese citizens to India.

In addition, China has accorded "Approved Destination Status" to India to enable Chinese travel agencies to organise the outbound travel groups of Chinese citizens to India.

It was also decided that exchange visit of students and faculty from hotel management institutes between the two countries which started in September 2007 may be continued on regular basis.

Both the sides were of the opinion that faculty exchange programmes should be organised between the human resource development institutes in India and China.

It was also decided that a special programme can be organised wherein the HRD experts from India and China can visit some of the institutes in both countries and interact with the teaching faculty through conferences and seminars.