India is gearing up to grab a larger pie of $80-bn medical tourism market

What is unusual though is that this time, the Government of India (GoI) has picked a niche: it is now focusing more on medical tourism, a segment valued at $60-80 billion globally.

Global tourism is taking flight again. With the pandemic waning, reports about airport chaos have surfaced in the US and Europe, confirming an abrupt rise in international air travel even as hard data on tourist arrivals are only trickling in.

This extraordinary travel boom, propelled by over two years of Covid uncertainty, will likely last longer, according to experts and officials. So it would be natural for Indian tourism to hope to ride this wave by coining a new slogan or two, or packaging a handful of tried and trusted destinations for a travel-hungry global audience.

What is unusual though is that this time, the Government of India (GoI) has picked a niche: it is now focusing more on medical tourism, a segment valued at $60-80 billion globally. This figure is based on an estimate of about 14 million medical tourists who cross the borders every year, according to a strategy paper published by India’s tourism ministry in January. The size and scale of wellness tourism is even larger — about $639 billion, according to estimates of Global Wellness Institute in 2017 as quoted in the same paper.