The Department of Floriculture, Gardens and Parks has reason to cheer, because the Indira Gandhi Memorial Tulip Garden in Srinagar has hit an incredible milestone. By just the 15th day of the Tulip Show, the garden surpassed a footfall of 4,46,154 visitors last year.
These aren’t simply visitors, but evidence of the garden being a premier tourist destination in Jammu and Kashmir and occupying an excellent 30 hectares with the scenic Dal Lake and Zabarwan Hills. The Asia’s largest tulip garden has over 1.5 million tulips showing their colours.
As a result, crowds gathered behind the gates and repeated the interest to see this event happening this season both from domestic visitors and foreign.
The success of the Tulip Garden demonstrates not only the great potential of horticultural tourism for driving the local economy but also in tourism spill-over to other sectors such as hospitality, transport, handicrafts benefiting from the needed increased footfalls translating into meaningful and positive livelihood changes through the region.
Commendable job by the Department of Floriculture for considering and planning, maintenance, and promotion for the success of this event.
With fame comes responsibility. Therefore, the authorities would have to ensure that the growing number of visitors is bringing ecological and aesthetic integrity to the garden.
Absolutely, sustainable tourism, overcrowding, and waste management measures should be adopted to preserve the garden’s pristine beauty for future generations.
The continued running of the Tulip Show always brought with it the notion that the garden would always achieve the highest marks as it reaffirmed Kashmir is Paradise on Earth. It is not just a garden made for tourists to enjoy; it should also represent what nature can show the world and bring to our region in terms of tourism revival.
