Post-budget 2018 Reaction Mr. Anand Kandadai, Executive Vice President, Cleartrip

The budget does seem to have some promising measures and provisions for the Indian tourism and hospitality industry that has emerged as one of the key drivers of growth. Today, when India has achieved the position of being the fastest growing domestic aviation market in the world, increasing the number of airports considerably is imperative to ensure that the growth impetus does not hit an infrastructure roadblock and the momentum continues. It is heartening to see the government backing up the ambitious UDAN plan with budgetary provisions for airports. What is noteworthy is that the thought process has been comprehensive, and in addition to connectivity there is a separate mention of expanding airport capacity by five times, which is a pressing problem, for many congested airports of the country.

This budget has the much-needed approach  for the creation of a holistic tourism infrastructure evident by Mr. Jaitley’s mention of boosting the land and rail connectivity, a proposal for focus on safety and sanitation measures and boosting connectivity with the proposal of setting up Wi-Fi hotspots thereby covering most major areas. A mention of ecological and sustainable tourism developed would have optimized this even further though. Government’s clarity of thought has translated into a clarity of intended action with the mention of connectivity upgrade to promote tourism in the North Eastern part of the country. A clarity on policy framework on land-bank monetisation for institutions such as AAI and Indian Railways that could reduce the dependency on central budget allocations is something that we were looking forward to. Some thrust on boosting the digital and payment infrastructure for sectors with big-ticket transactions like travel and a tax relief especially for indirect taxes (levied on the tourism and hospitality sector which is considerably higher than some of the major tourist destinations globally) is something that we were hopeful of hearing. We hope that government will bring these points to its consideration in addition to an optimization of GST in accommodation space in the months to come.