Nepal gears up for tourism challenge with swanky new airport.
Four and a half years after a devastating earthquake in April 2015 ravaged Nepal, the small hilly nation aims to reclaim its standing on the world tourism map with plans to attract Buddhist pilgrims from India, Bhutan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, besides countries like Japan, with a spanking new international airport close to the birthplace of Buddha. Potential economic spinoffs of the plan include new investments in tourism infrastructure such as hotels, which in turn is expected to spur employment generation in a country described as one of the poorest and slowest growing in Asia by the World Bank. Christened the Gautam Buddha International Airport, the facility is being developed with financial assistance from the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB). China’s Northwest Civil Aviation Construction Group is constructing the airport for which the ADB has provided $70 million. The airport is being developed under the South Asia Tourism Infrastructure Development Project. It is expected to be completed by March next year, ahead of the fifth anniversary of the temblor that killed some 9,000 people, said Prabhesh Adhikari, a senior official of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal. Situated in Rupandehi district, some 280 kilometres from Kathmandu, the upcoming airport will function as a second gateway to the country, which is home to the some of the world’s tallest mountains, catering to tourists wanting to visit Lumbini. India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia have already expressed interest in starting airline operations from the upcoming airport, said Naresh Pradhan, the ADB official overseeing the airport project.According to official statistics, 11.73 lakh tourists visited Nepal in 2018. Of this, nearly 2 lakh were Indians, 69,640 from Sri Lanka and 26,355 were from Bangladesh.Developing the Gautam Buddha International Airport was also aimed at diversifying tourism to other parts of the country that has so far remained concentrated in central Nepal, Vaidya said.
