DA Editorial Desk |Dhruba Deka
On World Tourism Day, Chief Minister Manik Saha made a case for tourism as an emerging pillar of Tripura’s economy, crediting the renovation of temples and heritage sites for rising footfall and pointing to the state’s second-place ranking among Northeastern states by GSDP as evidence the strategy is working. Speaking after a Mann Ki Baat listening session, he framed tourism as a source of both revenue and youth employment, with skill-development training helping local communities share in its benefits. It is a hopeful, well-intentioned vision, and the underlying instinct — that Tripura’s temples, hills and waterways represent a genuine, underused economic asset — is sound.
The numbers largely support the claim of growth, even if they complicate the claim of transformation. Tourist arrivals climbed from 5.29 lakh in 2018-19 to 7.60 lakh in 2024-25, and domestic arrivals alone rose a striking 64 per cent between 2023 and 2024, with foreign arrivals up 36 per cent in the same period — enough to make Tripura the second most-visited Northeastern state by foreign tourists, behind only Sikkim. The state’s own Tourism Minister has cited these figures with evident pride at national forums, and they are not empty statistics: infrastructure spending backed by the Asian Development Bank, the redevelopment of the Tripura Sundari Temple inaugurated by the Prime Minister last September, and a newly launched Matabari Tourism Circuit have visibly reshaped what the state has to offer visitors. Between January and June 2026 alone, Tripura logged nearly 3.85 lakh domestic and over 9,400 foreign tourist visits.
Look more closely at where those visitors are actually going, however, and a considerably less even picture emerges. Assembly data cited in recent reporting shows West District — home to Agartala and its immediate surroundings — accounted for a staggering 97.66 per cent of the roughly 19,170 foreign tourist visits recorded statewide in 2025-26. Unakoti, one of Tripura’s most nationally and internationally significant heritage destinations, celebrated for its ancient rock-cut sculptures, recorded just 127 foreign visitors across the entire year — some months logging as few as one or three. Combined, Unakoti, Sepahijala and Gomati districts, despite housing some of the state’s richest religious and archaeological attractions, drew barely 1.66 per cent of Tripura’s total foreign tourist footfall between them.
This is the gap an editorial celebrating tourism’s rise has an obligation to name plainly. A state cannot describe tourism as a broad-based economic driver while its growth is this heavily concentrated in and around the capital. Domestic and foreign visitors flocking to West District’s temples and heritage sites is genuinely good news for Agartala’s hotels, guides, transport operators and vendors. It does comparatively little for a family in Unakoti or Dhalai hoping tourism might create the kind of local employment the Chief Minister described in his World Tourism Day remarks. If tourism’s promised jobs and skill-development benefits are to reach “local communities” in the way Saha suggested, those communities cannot mean West District alone.
To be fair to the state government, some of the newer investment does appear aimed at correcting exactly this imbalance — waterfront development in Amarpur, infrastructure upgrades at Chabimura and Unakoti, and the Paryatan Sahayak Prakalp entrepreneurship scheme designed to bring local stakeholders into the tourism economy beyond the capital. These are the right kinds of projects to close the gap the district-wise data reveals. What remains to be seen is whether they receive sustained investment and marketing attention comparable to what West District’s temples have enjoyed, or whether they remain smaller-scale efforts overshadowed by more headline-friendly announcements closer to Agartala.
There is also a fair question about how tourism’s contribution is actually measured. GSDP rankings and rising arrival figures are useful indicators, but they do not, on their own, establish how much of that growth is translating into sustainable local livelihoods versus revenue concentrated among a smaller number of established operators near the capital. A more granular public accounting — of tourism-linked employment by district, not just visitor headcounts — would let both the government and Tripura’s citizens judge the sector’s real reach rather than its most visible successes.
None of this diminishes the genuine progress tourism has made in Tripura over the past several years, progress that deserves recognition rather than dismissal. But an economic engine is only as strong as the breadth of the load it can carry. Right now, Tripura’s tourism engine is running hard in one district and idling in several others equally capable of contributing, if given the same attention.