Rehan Qayoom Mir
Srinagar, Oct 14: Stating that the revival of tourism hasn’t been a journey without challenges, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Tuesday said that Jammu and Kashmir hopes to rebuild tourism on snowfall to woo visitors.
Addressing an event at a Srinagar hotel, CM Omar said that there is a clear slowdown in our economy post the middle of April this year and that will have a bearing on the government’s ability to be able to spend as the year goes to a close.
He said that the manufacturing, tourism, handicrafts, handlooms, and unfortunately because of the recent heavy rains and floods both in Jammu and in Kashmir, agriculture and horticulture have also not remained unscathed.
“Our own internal assessment is that coupled with the recent changes in the GST rates, which will obviously impact our GST earnings, we will have a hold on our GST earnings alone for anything in the range of 900 to 1000 crores this year. And for a state that anyway has a deficit financial position, 1000 crores is a lot of money to lose in terms of earnings in one year. But that said, this is not a situation of doom and gloom. It’s not a story of pessimism. It’s a story of hope. It’s a story of optimism. It’s a story of not looking backwards but looking forwards,” he said.
The Chief Minister said that he along with his colleagues and friends in the tourism industry is working hard to put things back on track.
“It hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been a journey without challenges. We had hoped that the revival would be a little quicker than it has turned out to be. The fact is that while summer was an entirely lost season, in fact even autumn hasn’t been as promising as we had hoped. We had hoped to see a reasonably strong tourism growth, particularly from the east of India, centred around the Punjab holidays,” he said.
He also said that his year has been difficult – first, because of the Pahalgam terror attack and then the India-Pakistan conflict. “Then, in July, August, and September, there were heavy losses due to rain and flash floods. The result is that the condition in Jammu and Kashmir is very bad. For tourism promotion, one of our teams is in Singapore. Southeast Asia is a very big market for tourism, and we are trying to capitalise on that. We are also promoting tourism in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Ahmedabad,” he said.
“We draw a lot of our tourism from West Bengal and large groups from there, which unfortunately this year we didn’t see in the numbers that we had hoped to. Now our next hope is for a decent winter season. We hear that this winter will be more extreme than past winters and that we can hope for more snow than perhaps in previous ones. If that’s the case, then hopefully we will rebuild our tourism on the snow in Jammu and Kashmir,” he said.
While speaking to media persons on the sidelines of the FICCI National Executive Committee meeting in Srinagar, the Chief Minister said that he has no knowledge about senior party leader and MP Aga Ruhullah Mehdi’s decision to stay away from the National Conference’s campaign for bypolls in Budgam.
Asked about Ruhullah’s recent remark that he would not participate in the party’s campaign for by-poll in Budgam, CM Omar said that he didn’t know anything about him.
