EXPERIMENTERÉ

  According to the India Tourism Data Compendium 2025 , our state recorded 3.12 million Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in 2024 — securing the #2 spot nationally , right behind Maharashtra. That’s a healthy 14.92% share of all India’s foreign arrivals. On the domestic front, the numbers are even more staggering: 184.47 million domestic tourist visits , reflecting a strong 26.64% year-on-year growth .  Yet, if you open Google Maps or most travel platforms, this boom is strangely hard to find. The Inbound Paradox While Kolkata airport handled 2.76 lakh foreign arrivals (3.33% of India’s total air arrivals), a significant portion of Bengal’s tourism also comes through land borders (especially the Bangladesh corridor) and via other major hubs. Outbound from Kolkata stood at 9.08 lakh departures. The numbers are real. The digital visibility? Not so much. We are ranked #2 nationally for foreign tourist visits and feature comfortably in the top 10 states for domestic tourism — be...

In the quiet pages of history, some stories travel farther than others. Between 1879 and 1916, more than 60,000 Indians — mostly from the rural heartlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — boarded ships from Kolkata’s Garden Reach Depot, crossing the kala pani toward an uncertain future in Fiji. They were called Girmitiyas — a word born from their own pronunciation of the English “Agreement.” I recently recreated their trail as a vintage illustrated map in the spirit of 19th-century colonial cartography. Not to glorify the system, but to remember the human journey behind the records. The route begins in the dusty villages of Awadh and Bhojpur, moves through the recruiting networks of arkatis , passes through the bustling Garden Reach depot in Calcutta, and then stretches across the vast Bay of Bengal. On the other end lie the sugarcane plantations of Fiji — places where language, food, culture, and resilience took root in foreign soil. Looking at this map, one feels the weight of both los...