As Asia's largest Tulip garden in Srinagar has been thrown open for visitors, the tourism stakeholders are hoping that it would lead to further surge in tourist flow to the Valley.
The Tulip garden was thrown open for visitors on March 23. The garden would remain open for nearly a month.
This year the Tulip garden has 17 lakh tulips including five new varieties. The Asia’s largest Tulip Garden in Srinagar is spread over 30 hectares of land and is situated on the banks of world famous Dal lake and on foothills of Zabarwan range.
An official said a total of 73 varieties of tulips will greet the visitors in the Tulip garden this year.
Other spring flowers like hyacinths, daffodils, muscari and cyclamens will also be on display to add to the variety of flowers and colours in the Tulip garden.
The carpet of flowers, which gives a feeling of paradise, is attracting a lot of tourists and locals every year. It has also emerged as the favourite locations for shooting movies, serials and videos.
“The garden is of huge importance and has become a unique selling point on our tourism landscape. Earlier, fewer tourists visited Kashmir in spring, which, I reckon, is the best season. Tulip Garden has changed that. It has advanced Kashmir’s tourist season by at least a month and given a big boost to the tourism industry,” said a tour operator Sajad Ahmed.
Last year, a record 370,000 tourists, national and international, visited the Tulip garden.
Tourism, which contributes about 7 per cent to J&K’s gross domestic product, provides employment to people working in the hotel, hospitality and transport sectors, besides being a source of livelihood for tour operators, travel agents, and souvenir sellers.
It also supports handloom, handicrafts, horticulture, and floriculture departments. Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has been witnessing an upsurge in tourism for the last few years.
The tourism stakeholders – ranging from government officials, trade representatives, hoteliers, tour operators and houseboat owners – are hopeful that this year there would be further increase in tourist inflow to the garden.
Last year over 2 crore tourists visited Jammu and Kashmir.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while speaking in Srinagar rally on March 7, said over 20 million tourists visited J&K in 2023.
In January this year, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha, at an event in New Delhi, noted a record 21.2 million tourists, including 55,000 foreigners, travelled to J&K last year.
According to official figures, 18 million tourists visited J&K in 2022, up from 11 million a year before. The tourist footfall in Kashmir more than doubled from nearly 1,300,000 in 2016 to over 2,600,000 in 2022, with the number of foreigners growing from over 1,600 in 2021 to nearly 20,000 in 2022.