Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Architect Abha Narain Lambah didn’t mince words as she laid out the harsh realities of India’s tourism and culture, and heritage conservation landscape, yet she also provided solutions that needed to be executed. India’s tourism landscape is replete with architectural and cultural heritage, she noted at the India Today Tourism Survey & Awards 2026, held on June 14-15 in Goa, but it remains “greatly untapped” with stakeholders unaware of the “immense potential”.
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The argument was laid out best in some hard facts put forth by Lambah—the Louvre Museum in Paris alone attracts more visitors annually than all of India does; India only has 3,900 nationally protected monuments, significantly low compared to United Kingdom which, while not even as big as Uttar Pradesh, has over 100,000 such sites.
It’s one thing to have limited heritage sites and quite another that there’s no restriction on construction and rampant encroachment around them. “It’s akin to killing geese that lay the golden eggs,” Lambah said in her address during the session ‘Catalysing heritage: Why the past is still the future of India’s tourism growth story’.
For Lambah, a tourism policy should also factor in the route and landscape around, say, the Taj Mahal and not solely the wonder of the world. There was also a plea to look at historic palaces and cultural museums as repositories of a region’s identity.
If India wants to see tourism contribute more to its economy, then acquiring a UNESCO tag—heritage site, intangible heritage, creative city—is a great tool to get on the tourism map. China, Lambah noted, is far more active than any nation in preparing dossiers for its heritage. Lambah’s eponymous firm has made many successful dossiers, including Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan and Lucknow as creative city for gastronomy. The fact that places like Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir have none is a major blip. Meanwhile. Lambah looks forward to seeing her latest dossier on Sarnath reaping yet another World Heritage Site tag for Uttar Pradesh.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS
* Stop looking at tourism just from a marketing and packaging perspective.
* Tourism departments need to sync with urban development, culture, archaeology, heritage and city planning departments to create a more wholesome experience for travellers.
* The UNESCO tag is an ideal way for cities and countries to project themselves, with serial nominations as an effectively strategy. Mumbai’s Victoria and art deco precinct with 83 buildings is an example.
* The quality of tourists coming, the money they pay, and how the local economy is enriched are more important than the volume of footfalls.
* Conservation should be seen as an enabler of community.
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– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
