Northstar

22 | www.travelweekly-asia.com Group of tourists are riding camels in the desert at Mingsha Mountain, Dunhuang, China. Credit: Memindshot/iStock TOUR OPERATOR TOUR OPERATORS CALL FOR INDIA TO CLIMB ONBOARD SILK ROAD There is concern among Indian tour operators that the country has yet to commit to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation's (UNWTO) Silk Road initiative. Phase One of the plan is moving ahead to include countries from Central Asia and China. "This is a big opportunity for India to collaborate with UNWTO," said Subhash Goyal, president Indian Association of Tour Operators, speaking during the annual travel and tourism trade show, SATTE, held in Delhi. "India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are conspicuously absent (from the Silk Road initiative) and little efforts have been made to explore this concept in India," Goyal said. He said his own company, Stic Travels, would offer a Silk Road By Neelam Mathews tour soon. There are at least 12 Silk Road sites in India across seven states on the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. "It is an everlasting story," said Goyal. "For 20 years, we've been doing intellectual gymnastics over this." The Silk Road is an ancient network of trade routes that were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent, connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea. Speaking on the relevance of thematic routes, Suman Billa, joint secretary, Ministry of Tourism India, said, "South Asia has enormous potential for telling the Silk Road story to travellers." He did not however commit a deadline for India to move on the programme. Alla Peressolova, head of the UNWTO Silk Road Programme, said expertise on how to proceed with tourism routes had been structured by UNWTO. Heading a collaborative platform in which 33 UNWTO member states, as well as a wide range of public and private stakeholders, participated, Peressolova said there has been progress on route development. She said it highlighted linkages between tourism and culture and the possibility of rebuilding a positive association with India along the Silk Roads. Peressolova stressed the importance of ease in visa regimes to facilitate travel and appealed to tour operators to "push their governments". UNWTO is using the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to identify routes "because they have done research on the Silk Road and divided it into 52 corridors," Peressolova said. The first of two recognised corridors comprises China and Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, countries whose tourism ministers met at ITB Berlin in March to exchange ideas. UNWTO will be holding a Silk Road conference in Iran in October. UNESCO had developed a Silk Road Online Platform which "revives and extends historic networks in a digital space, bringing people together in an ongoing dialogue about the Silk Roads in order to foster a mutual understanding of the diverse and often inter-related cultures that have sprung up around them." A UNWTO study concluded the Silk Road destinations were among the 26.5% of the world's top touring routes, comprising some 50,000km. "We did research on social media and found 30% of 300,000 conversations on travel were about the Silk Road. And Forbes said the Silk Road was one of the world's biggest brands, bigger than Coke," Peressolova said. An ancient network of trade routes is an everlasting story that India, along with other surrounding countries, wants to tell travellers.

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