The relationship between transport infrastructure and tourism development is substantial, as tourists' mobility largely depends on infrastructure. Therefore, this paper examines the role of transport infrastructure as a significant determinant of foreign tourist growth in India. This study employs 44 years of time-series data from 1980 to 2023, because the Government of India declared its first tourism policy in the 1980s. To understand the rate at which the system reverts to the long-run equilibrium following a short-run shock, we use the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and the Error Correction Model (ECM). The results of this paper show a long-term relationship between variables such as air transport, GDP and exchange rates, which provide substantial access to foreign tourist benefits. Rail and road infrastructure have a minor contribution to foreign tourist arrivals. The error-correction model indicates robust short-term adjustment towards equilibrium following short-term disturbances. Finally, the Granger causality results indicate unidirectional and bidirectional causality between the variables, supporting the centrality of the transport variable in foreign tourist development in India. The article offers an innovative method that combines multimodal transport variables and non-transport variables to assess the process of tourist progression in India.
Oberoi et al. (Thu,) studied this question.