Karnataka to focus on health and wellness tourism

The Karnataka government is planning to offer tax and non-tax incentives to entrepreneurs wanting to set up health and wellness related units in the state. For the first time, the state has drawn up such a proposal in the soon-to-be-launched Karnataka tourism policy 2014-19.

Medical Tourism has attracted over 1.3 million people to India in 2013 alone and Karnataka is keen to jump on the bandwagon. It wants to attract investments in new facilities and draw more medical tourists to the city for high-end and complicated procedures.

According to an internal report of the tourism department, Karnataka is seeing a sharp increase in the number of tourists and almost a 25 per cent annual rise in the medical and wellness tourism.

Another recent study also advocated that states can overcome the travel industry's reliance on seasonality and vagaries of a global economic climate by promoting health and wellness tourism. The study found that Karnataka's established tourism infrastructure, with its capacity to support world-class hotel services and quality of medical services, offers the best platform for this segment.