BY PRATHIMA MANOHAR,
(Social entrepreneur and the founder of The Urban Vision)
MUMBAI | 26 MAY 2026
One of the more striking features of the global economy today is that countries with relatively few natural resources are increasingly earning enormous amounts of foreign exchange from tourism and experiences. Spain earns more from tourism annually than many industrial economies earn from manufacturing exports. Thailand has built a multi-billion-dollar tourism economy around food, culture, wellness and hospitality. Singapore transformed itself from a transit stop into one of the world’s highest-yield urban destinations through attractions , airports, waterfronts, public space and seamless mobility.
Meanwhile, India which is one of the world’s most culturally layered and geographically diverse nations still treats tourism largely as a peripheral hospitality sector rather than a core economic strategy.
This matters because tourism has quietly become one of the world’s most efficient foreign-exchange engines. Every international visitor effectively imports demand into the domestic economy. Unlike traditional exports, tourism earnings flow directly into local ecosystems: hotels, cafés, transport operators, artisans, guides, performers, markets, museums, wellness centres and small businesses. At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has warned about the pressures created by rising oil and gold imports, inbound tourism deserves far more attention as a mechanism for strengthening India’s forex position.
For a country that imports more than 80 per cent of its crude oil requirements, tourism should be treated not as a soft sector but as strategic economic infrastructure.
Globally, countries have begun to recognise tourism not as hospitality alone but as a core pillar of economic competitiveness. Travel and tourism contributed roughly US$11tn to the world economy in 2025. International visitor spending crossed US$2tn globally. Spain earned more than €126bn from foreign tourists last year. America generated over US$215bn in tourism receipts. Thailand, with a population fraction of India’s, has consistently earned upwards of US$60bn annually through tourism.
India, despite possessing one of the world’s richest combinations of spirituality, heritage, cuisine, ecology and culture, remains dramatically underleveraged by comparison.
This is not because India lacks attractions and monuments. It is because tourism success increasingly depends less on attractions than on systems.
The countries that dominate tourism revenues are rarely those with the most monuments. They are the countries that best organise mobility, public space, safety, discoverability and experience around those monuments.
Spain’s Barcelona’s transformation after the 1992 Barcelona Olympics remains one of the world’s defining examples of tourism-led urban regeneration. The city invested heavily in waterfront restoration, pedestrianisation, public transport and civic design. Tourism growth followed because Barcelona became pleasant to move through, not merely because it possessed great architecture.
Singapore approached tourism with similar strategic clarity. Marina Bay Sands, Gardens by the Bay, Changi Airport and the city’s celebrated hawker-based street food market ecosystem were not isolated projects; they formed part of a coordinated national effort to build Asia’s most seamless urban experience. Singapore understood that airports, waterfronts, night-time economies, public cleanliness and transit systems are all tourism infrastructure.
Thailand’s success similarly rests on what might be called “experience density”. Bangkok’s food streets, markets, riverfronts and transit systems create an environment where visitors continuously engage and spend. Tourism there is not confined to landmarks. It permeates the city itself.
India, by contrast, still tends to approach tourism primarily through campaigns rather than integrated urban systems.
This is increasingly untenable. Modern travellers choose destinations not only for monuments but for atmosphere: walkable neighbourhoods, public life, waterfronts, local culture, food scenes, safety and ease of movement. They seek experiences, not simply itineraries.
The world is already curious about India. But tourists encounter congested roads, poor pedestrian environments, fragmented booking systems, weak signage, inconsistent hygiene, polluted waterfronts or poorly maintained public spaces. In effect, India possesses world-class cultural assets embedded within uneven public spaces and infrastructure.
The implication is clear: tourism policy must increasingly become urban policy.
India should identify and systematically develop perhaps 100 high-potential experience districts from temple towns, heritage precincts, coastal corridors, culinary districts, wellness regions and cultural neighbourhoods and treat them as integrated special economic zones.
This requires investment not merely in hotels but in the quality of place itself: pedestrian streets, waterfront restoration, public toilets, multilingual signage, shaded walkways, lighting, transit integration, digital discoverability, cultural programming and seamless booking systems.
The economics of such investments are often underestimated. A well-designed waterfront or pedestrian district does not merely improve tourism receipts; it raises land values, stimulates retail activity, attracts private investment and improves quality of life for residents themselves.
India must also simplify inbound travel dramatically. Competing destinations across Southeast Asia have moved aggressively towards visa-free entry, frictionless immigration and digitally integrated visitor systems. India’s e-visa reforms were an important step, but the country still remains more cumbersome than many competing tourism economies.
Equally important is the need to rethink airports and railway stations as civic gateways rather than transport utilities. Changi Airport functions as an extension of Singapore’s national brand. Istanbul Airport performs a similar role for Turkey. India’s airport modernisation programme has advanced rapidly, but surrounding urban integration often remains weak.
The broader point is that tourism now sits at the intersection of urbanisation, mobility, soft power, services and foreign exchange. This matters economically because tourism represents one of the cleanest ways to strengthen India’s foreign-exchange position.
At a moment when oil imports continue to pressure the current account, sectors that attract global spending directly into local economies become strategically significant.
The countries that understand this are investing accordingly. Saudi Arabia plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on tourism and destination infrastructure under Vision 2030 because it recognises tourism as part of a post-oil future. The UAE used aviation, retail, urban spectacle and waterfront development to transform Dubai into a global tourism and transit economy within a generation.
India’s opportunity may be even larger because its advantage lies not in artificial spectacle but in extraordinary cultural depth. Few countries can offer such diversity of language, cuisine, geography, spirituality and local identity within a single national territory. But cultural abundance alone does not automatically generate economic value. It must be made accessible, navigable and investable.
The next decade of tourism competition will not be won by countries with the most attractions. It will be won by countries that best design systems around them.
And for India, that may prove to be not merely a tourism strategy, but an economic one.
(Prathima Manohar is Chair of Urbanism Think-Do-Tank “The Urban Vision” and Co-Founder of GoodPass, an AI-enabled platform for local experiences. Her work focuses on placemaking, regenerative tourism, and building made-in-local economies and resilient infrastructure)
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