21.5 million employees in the Indian tourism sector lost their jobs

About 21.5 million people in the Tourism sector lost their jobs due to Covid-19 crisis, Union Tourism Minister G. Kishan Reddy said in Rajya Sabha.

The data published by the government on Tuesday reveals that majority of the employees lost their job during the nine month period from April 2020 to December 2020. It was during this period that the government implemented the lock down.

“About 14.5 million jobs during Q1, 5.2 million during Q2 and 1.8 million jobs during Q3 were expected to have been lost as compared to estimated 34.8 million jobs in the pre-pandemic period of 2019-20 [direct jobs],” the Minister said.

Mr. Reddy said this was one of the key findings of the study done by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) for the Ministry of Tourism to assess the extent of losses to the sector.

As per the report, due to overall economic slowdown during 2020-21, tourism economy or tourism direct gross value added (TDGVA) saw a fall of 42.8% in April-June 2020, 15.5% in July-September 2020 and fall of 1.1% in October-December 2020.

“Due to significant drop in tourist arrivals and hence tourism expenditure, during the pandemic, it is estimated that TDGVA plummeted by as much as 93.3% in Q1 of 2020-21 over its level in the same quarter of previous year,” the Minister stated, adding that it picked up slightly to post a decline of 79.5% and 64.3% in second quarter and third quarter respectively.

According to the Bureau of Immigration, the number of foreign tourists arrived in India declined to 2.74 million in 2020 and about 0.42 million till June 2021. It was 10.93 million in 2019.

According to the data compiled by the Ministry of Tourism, domestic tourist visits during the calendar year 2019 stood at 2321.98 million and in 2020 at 610.21 million.