BRICS Tourism Ministers adopt the Jaipur Declaration, focusing on AI, sustainable tourism, workforce skilling and easier travel across the nine-member bloc.
JAIPUR: BRICS Tourism Ministers concluded their meeting in Jaipur on Thursday with the consensus adoption of the Jaipur Declaration, a joint outcome document setting out a four-pillar roadmap for tourism cooperation across the bloc’s nine member nations. Chaired by India’s Union Minister for Culture and Tourism Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, the summit brought together ministers and senior officials from Brazil, Iran, South Africa, the UAE, China, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Russia under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.”
The Declaration is non-binding, adopted by consensus rather than treaty, yet it signals where an expanded BRICS grouping representing over 40% of the world’s population wants to steer one of its fastest-growing service sectors over the coming years.
Four Pillars, One Framework
The Communiqué organises its commitments around artificial intelligence and digital technologies, sustainability and responsible tourism, workforce skilling and travel facilitation. On AI, member states endorsed what the text calls “responsible, safe, and human-centred” deployment, covering multilingual visitor communication, destination management at fragile heritage sites and smart hospitality platforms at entry points. The sustainability pillar leans firmly toward community-centred models, tying growth directly to artisans, homestay operators and local micro-entrepreneurs rather than high-volume commercial tourism. On skilling, the Declaration commits members to continuous upskilling of the tourism workforce and formal industry-academia partnerships. The travel facilitation pillar covers joint destination promotion and, notably, an agreement to exchange tourism data and statistics, addressing what has long been a gap in tracking movement across the bloc.
From Crisis Recovery to Structural Ambition
The Jaipur outcome marks a distinct evolution from India’s previous BRICS Tourism Chairship. The 2021 New Delhi Declaration, adopted amid pandemic disruption, focused on restoring mobility and establishing the BRICS Alliance for Green Tourism as a defensive, recovery-oriented measure. By contrast, the 2026 text is prospective, embedding AI governance and structured skilling frameworks into tourism policy rather than responding to an immediate crisis. The membership base has also broadened considerably, from the original five BRICS nations to nine, folding in the UAE, Iran, Ethiopia and Indonesia alongside the founding members. This reflects the wider geographic and economic expansion of the bloc since 2021 and gives the Jaipur text a materially larger constituency to coordinate across.
Tourism as Economic Dispersal
Addressing the ministerial plenary, Shekhawat linked the Declaration’s outcomes to India’s Viksit Bharat by 2047 vision, framing tourism as a growth engine that, unlike capital-intensive industry, disperses economic activity into tier-2, tier-3 and rural regions. The Ministry of Tourism pointed to homestays, heritage bed-and-breakfasts, local transport operators, tour guides, handloom weavers and culinary entrepreneurs as direct beneficiaries of the community-centred approach the Declaration endorses. The framework also creates an opening to export India’s Digital Public Infrastructure stack, including UPI, DigiLocker and the Bhashini translation platform, into tourism systems across partner nations. Shekhawat characterised tourism’s soft power dimension directly, noting that it connects people and allows citizens of member countries to understand each other beyond formal government-to-government ties.
Heritage as Demonstration
Beyond the negotiating table, the summit doubled as a showcase of Rajasthan’s conservation credentials. Delegates were taken on a technical visit to Jaipur’s UNESCO-recognised sites, including Hawa Mahal, City Palace and Amber Fort, presented as working examples of sustainable heritage management. Sideline bilateral meetings between India and the ministerial delegations of Brazil, Iran, South Africa and the UAE focused on reviewing existing tourism exchanges and connectivity frameworks, groundwork that will need to translate into concrete air links and marketing tie-ups if the Declaration’s ambitions are to move beyond paper.
What the Text Leaves Unanswered
A close reading of the official document shows notable gaps. The Jaipur Declaration sets no quantifiable targets for intra-BRICS tourist arrivals, growth rates or revenue and establishes no dedicated funding pool or investment mechanism to back cross-border tourism infrastructure. There is no binding timeline for implementation and perhaps most significantly for travellers, no move toward a unified BRICS visa or visa-free regime; entry requirements across the nine-member bloc remain fragmented and harmonising them sits well outside the mandate of tourism ministries alone. Aviation connectivity presents a further constraint: while India’s air links to Middle Eastern and East Asian BRICS partners are well established, direct long-haul routes to Latin American and African members remain limited. The AI and data-sharing commitments will also need to navigate differing national frameworks on privacy and cross-border data transfer, a technical alignment task that now falls to the BRICS Tourism Working Group’s inter-sessional meetings.
The Road Ahead
With the ministerial declaration adopted, the real test shifts to the Working Group’s ability to convert four broad pillars into specific projects, and to whether bilateral conversations held on Jaipur’s sidelines produce actual flight routes, joint marketing campaigns and streamlined entry processes. The Declaration gives India, as chair, a framework it can point to as evidence of consensus-building across an increasingly diverse bloc. Whether it reshapes how nine nations’ citizens actually travel to and through each other’s countries will depend on follow-through that the text itself, by design, leaves largely unspecified.
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