Performance evaluation of Indian states in tourism using an integrated PROMETHEE-GAIA approach

Abstract

Tourism development has a unique responsibility in regional policy of almost all countries. It is a well known fact that tourism has a remarkable contribution in sustainable development, economic growth and social benefits for a country, if planned methodically. This is due to its unquestionable advantages and benefits for the local community with respect to economic, social and environmental aspects. Since few decades, it has become a driving area in Indian economic planning strategy to deal with tourism issues for effective utilization of its wide range of destination resources and also optimize the intensity of financial involvement for developing tourist infrastructure in a restraint economic province. This paper applies a simple methodology to quantify the tourism potential of Indian states using an integrated visual decision aid model of preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation (PROMETHEE) and geometrical analysis for interactive aid (GAIA). Several social and physical attributes are considered to evaluate and rank the Indian states with respect to their performance in tourism. The adoption of this integrated visual decision aid model identifies Jammu and Kashmir, and Jharkhand as the best and the worst performing states respectively. In GAIA plane, the position of Jammu and Kashmir is the farthest from origin, followed by Madhya Pradesh. A close comparison between these two top performing states reveals that Jammu and Kashmir mainly outperforms Madhya Pradesh with respect to budget allocation, population density, pollution index and cost of living index criteria. The performance of Jharkhand is not at all the best with respect to even a single criterion. In GAIA plane, it is also observed that the considered beneficial and non-beneficial criteria form two different clusters, as expected. This performance evaluation problem is identified to be not at all a hard problem to solve.