Research Projects

Tourism in India is important for the country's economy and is growing rapidly. The World Travel and Tourism Council calculated that tourism generated ?16.91 lakh crore (US$240 billion) or 9.2% of India's GDP in 2018 and supported 42.673 million jobs, 8.1% of its total employment. Over 10 million foreign tourists arrived in India in 2017 compared to 8.89 million in 2016, representing a growth of 15.6%. It is evident that large numbers of tourists both foreign as well as domestic are enjoying Indian heritage, culture and art. With the growth of social media and ICT technologies their travels are not only restricted to statistics. These tourists make constant updates on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter about their experiences. The social media has been a major platform throughout for people who post images, videos, blogs, check-ins and review heritage sites visited by them. Thus, these platforms contain rich content in terms of the focus of the state tourism as well as the opinion and experiences of the tourists. There have been huge discussions surrounding the concerns of the people on these platforms and the tourism sector in India that need attention. These discussions are in the form of highly unstructured user generated content and needs to be addressed to. This makes it essential for us in analyzing this unstructured micro blog text which may give us useful insights to identify the main user concerns surrounding heritage and tourism sites. Based on the tweets and posts made surrounding the Indian tourism and heritage on the digital space the inclination towards the same may be modelled using AI/ML algorithms to keep track of issues and concerns raised in these states from time to time. A tool will be developed which will give these insights on a real time basis.