India is heavily promoting Buddhist tourism in a bid to attract more tourists from countries with sizable Buddhist populations, including Japan, as part of a strategy to boost foreign tourist arrivals.
India is not only organizing an international Buddhist conclave every other year, but is also aggressively developing what it calls the Buddhist Circuit, which connects key places associated with the religion's heritage, government officials say.
"We are receiving a minuscule number of Buddhist tourists. . . . just 0.005 percent of the total Buddhist population in the world despite being a key pilgrimage destination for millions of practicing Buddhists around the world," Suman Billa, the Indian ministry of tourism's joint secretary, recently told journalists in New Delhi.