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The East and the North East were "well endowed and gifted with nature's bounty" and held great potential for earnings from tourism.

Kolkata , Dec. 9

THE Bengal Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BCCI) has decided to form a taskforce to prepare a blueprint aimed at providing a boost to tourism in West Bengal and the North East.

Towards this end, the taskforce will endeavour to co-operate and work together with the Union Ministry of Tourism and the tourism departments of States in the region.

It will be formed at the conclusion of a two-day seminar on the `Role of services & allied sectors in the resurgence of the East', scheduled to be held here on December 15 and 16. Deliberations at the seminar would be confined to three specific areas in the services sector — tourism, information technology and retail.

Stating this during a press conference held here on Tuesday, Mr Sumit Mazumder, President of the chamber, said the proposed taskforce will comprise all stakeholders in the tourism business including representatives from the travel trade, industry, airlines and hotels, among others.

The blueprint would focus on the need to create the required infrastructure for facilitation of tourism in the region. It would also focus on the marketing efforts that would be required to ensure "planned and sustainable" development of tourism. According to Mr Samir Ghosh, convenor of the seminar, the services sector accounts for 50 per cent of India's gross domestic product. It is growing faster than the manufacturing sector.

The idea behind the seminar is to "bring forth the value of the services sector which is widely dispersed". In this regard, he mentioned tourism and IT as having great potential for generation of foreign exchange earnings.

Mr Ghosh said the East and the North East were "well endowed and gifted with nature's bounty" and held great potential for earnings from tourism."We suffer because we do not have the right infrastructure and we cannot market ourselves," he said, adding that tourism was the fastest growing industry in the world.

According to him, retailing has been a success in all major cities and is now penetrating the markets in smaller cities and towns.

He also sought to draw a correlation between IT, tourism and infrastructure.

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