CM Stalin Welcomes The World to Visit Tamil Nadu

Chennai: Urging the global community to bookmark Tamil Nadu as their favourite tourist destination and carry indelible memories as they go back home, Chief Minister M K Stalin said the State had a lot of places to explore and experience as they offered vignettes of Nature's beauty, awe-inspiring architectural grandeur, towering structures to look up to and historic places narrating the greatness of a glorious past.

Addressing the Tamil Nadu Global Tourism Summit in Chennai on Monday, Stalin said that while participants of the summit, who had come from all over the world, knew about the greatness of the Tamil language and the antiquity of the civilization, the DMK government was making efforts, through a plethora of initiative, to develop tourism.

Listing out the initiatives, he said the archeological museums showcasing the findings at Keeladi and Porunai and the modern colosseum near Madurai for Jallikattu were among the signature projects while other measures like laying a glass bridge to reach the Thiruvalluvar statue in Kanyakumari from the Vivekananda rock, developing infrastructural facilities at Pichavaram and Courtallam had also been taken, he said.

In the last five years, the DMK government had allocated Rs 612.18 crore for tourism that had led to128.97 crore inland tourists and 45 lakh foreign tourists visiting Tamil Nadu, which, however, was not a big achievement for the State that believed in the ancient dictum ‘yaddum oore, yavarum kezhir’ (every place is ours and everyone is our relative), the Chief Minister said.

The Tamil Nadu Tourism Policy of 2023 listed 12 priority tourism sectors and the State followed a regulated procedure to obtain single-window permission, besides taking up 13 tourism development schemes to attract private investments that had also been incentivized through subsidies, additional investment subsidy, infrastructure incentive and concession in power tariff, he said.

The summit would see the signing of 127 MoUs for an investment of Rs 22,794.78 crore in various sectors of the tourism industry, which would provide 65,915 jobs, he said and assured the investors of all government support in their projects.

Stalin also made three announcements for the development of tourism in the State, which included the organization of a Tamil Finale next January to ensure Tamil Nadu a place in the world tourism map as a tourist spot of arts and culture and creating modern facilities at a cost of Rs 100 crore at Mamallapuram.