How to make our archaeological sites better

07 February, 2013

The emphasis is laid here on finding out how much money is raised by any archeological site in India from the payments of visitors - both domestic and foreigners. Here we need to understand how much of that money is spent. Given my understanding of the issue, I believe that there is lack of transparency and reports of the revenue and expenditures are seldom published.

Since tourism plays a very important role when it comes to boosting up the economy of any state or any region, various archeological sites become all the more important from tourism point of view, because these are the most preferred places for tourists to spend some good quality time at. At many of these sites, there is an entrance fee collected.

Based on the existing laws, it will be interesting to find out as to how this money is spent over a period of time. The flow of money keeps on increasing year after year with the increase in the flow of tourist traffic. The issue here is if the revenue is increasing then efforts should be made to increase the facilities for the tourists. Therefore, the question is how much money is collected and how it is spent.

There are plenty of archeological sites in India. One of the main objectives of the tourists’ community visiting such places is that they look forward to unwind themselves from day to day affairs of routine work by seeking pleasure/ happiness from coming to such places and seeing/exploring new things in life and also enhancing their knowledge base through this visit.

Besides general tourist community, even school children and college students are frequent visitors to such sites and their objectives are both pleasure/adventure seeking and knowledge enhancing. Therefore, any new facility created in these sites to make the visitors feel more comfortable would be a move in the right direction to attract more and more tourists.

In the present scheme of things perhaps a portion of this money goes towards creating newer facilities for the tourist public. One solution could be publication of annual reports and obtaining them at a nominal fee should be encouraged for all archeological sites. Based on these reports, more and more ideas and suggestions could be made forthcoming for bettering the facilities for the tourists. Such a measure would help the tourism sector to grow in a better way.