“Let’s bring people around the table!”, this is the motto of the Tourism Secretary Sujit Banerjee. Dynamic and motivated, Banerjee has faced a series of crisis ever since he took over the job in November 2008. But his determination, his love for the country and its heritage and his own values take him directly on the ground to experiment and participate in the tourism development at all levels. Bringing people together and discuss the issues and understand them to act better. In an interview with Christine Nayagam, Banerjee talks about India Tourism’s actions to tackle different problems, going from the big reduction in the arrivals of tourists caused by global financial crisis to a shortage of hotel rooms for the 2010 New Delhi Commonwealth Games and finally walking the tightrope between promotion of tourism and the protection of environment.

Two months after your visit to Berlin and the launch of “Visit India Year” programme, what has been the progress?

Well, it is true that we have continuously been hit by some whammy or the other. When I joined in November, we were well into the global economic recession. Then we had the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. After that and after the problems caused by recession, our figures of foreign tourist arrival in India have gone down drastically. November was -2,6 %, December was –13,6%, January was –17,6%, February we saw a small recovery when it was only –10%, and then March has also been not very good for us, it has gone back to –12,9% as compare to last year. And now what has happen is that, this H1N1 or Swine Flu as they call it has also hit us. So, you know, we have been facing continuously all these negatives. And you know that our hotels are at 40-45% occupancy and our tour operators have registered very low demands, working with half of the groups that used to come. So we have launched a couple of things as we said that it is best to work when you are down and out. And our stakeholders, all of them whether they are hoteliers, tour operators, travel agents, all of them have contributed and have joined us in this campaign. And this campaign has been done with the 2009 Visit India Year Campaign. It has begun from first of April and is supposed to go on till 31st of December 2009, but we will see how it will goes and see if we need to revisit it.