Recommendations made by Mr. Amaresh Tiwari –
The global MICE industry is estimated to be upwards of $800 billion and India’s share pre Covid was estimated to be around 1 %.
MICE sector has the strongest direct correlation to the GDP more than any other tourism sector.
Thus our first objective post Covid , in medium term would be to double our MICE share to 2.5% of the world and then doubling it over medium to long term.
In the global international congress associations rankings our goal will be to take India’s rank to the top 10 in the world from 28 where we were pre Covid.
We will also request central and state governments to aim to benchmark the MICE infrastructure of our Indian cities to the top global mice cities.
Pre Covid, we had 1 city in the top 100 rank. Our goal must be to be having 3 Indian cities in the top 100 in the medium term post Covid and 6 – 10 cities in top 100 in the medium to long term.
We need to recognise MICE Tourism as a distinct business segment and create MICE India Brand a sub-brand to the main brand Incredible India.
This needs to be aggressively marketed worldwide.
We must target global congress, conventions and conferences, and social events we need to create a global MICE bidding fund with a corpus for ₹ 500 crores to enable our entrepreneurs undertake techno economic bids for events which have a bid cycle of 2 years plus.
We need to create city convention bureaus in each of our main cities, which will work with ICPB as their hub to carry out a global bidding activity.
Industry Status to MICE Infrastructure by states so that Convention centres and hotels. This will enable power and utility rates levies at Industrial rates amongst other benefits.
Infrastructure status for financing of MICE Infrastructure, currently this is available only to 3 star and above hotels located outside the cities with population of 1 million and above.
Institutional Support for MICE Events : ICPB as bureau acts as an agent, representative, marketer, leader and co-ordinator for MICE Industry.
Market Intelligence : The MOT will work with states to develop Data Collection and analysis mechanism for MICE Industry.
In the post – Covid era we also need to incentivize Indian corporates to undertake domestic MICE and to prevent Indian MICE events from going abroad. For that we need to offer a 200% weighted income tax expense benefit to Indian companies which are undertaking MICE events in India .
We need to enable IGST for our hotels, which will complete the end to end GST chain and companies get GST setoffs for companies undertaking MICE events in states other than their state of registration.
Also our GST rates are one of the highest in the world and to revive we should move immediately to a 12% GST rate for all MICE related events with full set offs and gradually to below 10% in the medium term with full set offs.
Of the Special Tourism Zones being planned by tourism ministry we look forward to a mega tourism zone, which should be fully integrated world class MICE city.
As the virtual MICE become the order of the day, we look forward to each state recognising this and supporting both physical and hybrid MICE activities on a structured and financial basis.
Indian tourism has globally unique cultural phenomena. Between all states collaboratively and centre we must ensure that Indian MICE has the unique advantage of being bundled with the natural and cultural assets of India.
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