COLOMBO – The Sri Lankan government has decided to grant the on-arrival Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) facility to tourists from India to boost tourist arrivals this year, an official said on Monday.

The official from the Sri Lanka tourism sector told Xinhua that this facility is already available for arrivals from some European countries including Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland, and it has now been extended to tourists from India as it was a big source market.

According to official figures, India was the biggest source of tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka with 56,268 arrivals in 2021. Sri Lanka offered the ETA facility to foreign tourists, but it was temporarily suspended following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Sri Lanka has recently revised its tourist arrival forecast for 2022 down from 2.3 million to 1.1 million due to challenges posed by the Omicron variant. Tourism contributed to 4.3 percent of Sri Lanka’s Gross Domestic Product and offered job opportunities to 402,607 people in 2019.