Reality of Tourism in Nepal

Tourism is not contributing to the Nepalese economy significantly. Its contribution in GDP is roughly 2 to 3%. Some people argue that the “Tourism Satellite Accounting” would produce exact contribution. That’s right, but there are some problems. First, it’s very difficult and costly to conduct the TSA. Second, the figure really doesn’t contribute really to the economy. In other words, suppose the contribution has been doubled, it doesn’t uplift the living standard of the people more than now, does it? The answer is negative. So, it’s only the play of words and figures. The benefit of the conducting the TSA is to know more accurately the contribution of tourism so that the policy makers can use this information for their decision making. In the absence of the right information the trial and error methods applied by policy makers would cost precious time and scarce resources. However, this has been little in practice in our context.

Tourism in Nepal is neither a mass nor niche tourism. Even if we claim our tourism is mass tourism, it’s not like that. The fact is that our tourism policy is open to tourists, but this has not been able to create a mass market as in the countries like France, Spain, Japan and US. In fact, it’s not possible to have mass tourism in our country with host of reasons. First, we don’t have the supportive infrastructures and superstructures. Second, the geographical setting is also responsible for this. Third, the economy itself is not so helping. Our economy is so small that virtually it has no effect even in our trading partners. Fourth, the private entrepreneurs are not capable enough to handle the tourism business. Fifth, no good air connections with various generating markets. Last but not the least, airfare is costly.

The various names of tourism are just the names of the games given by the players. Neither the government nor the entreprenuer wants tourists without money. Tourism be flourished in our country, there should be a strong mechanism of supervision and monitoring. Unless and until this is in place we can't get benefits out of tourism. There are always complaints by stakeholders; in fact they are not really the stakeholders.