A populist slogan during Indira Gandhi’s regime was ‘The nation is on the move.’ Though whether the motion was in forward or reverse gear was open to question.

Today, the nation is very much on the move, quite literally, and its movement is decidedly outward bound.

According to a TOI report, Indians are spending an estimated $17bn on foreign sojourns, as compared with $17mn fifteen years ago, which represents a thousand per cent jump.

While a large chunk of this expenditure is for studying abroad, the biggest percentage increase has been for leisure travel, which is all the more remarkable in that the cost of the US dollar has gone up from ₹23 to almost ₹88.

Despite this cost deterrence, more and more Indians are spending more and more on foreign travel, and many are doing so on borrowed cash.

A credit card survey has shown that more of us (27%) are borrowing more money for foreign vacations than for home improvements (24%), medical expenses (9.6%), education (6.1%), or weddings (5.4%).

How did this travel bug bite India? Thirty years ago, Indians by and large, were stay-at-homes, rooted by family or community ties to the city, town, or village they belonged to.

If they travelled at all it was for work, business, or religious pilgrimage. Travel just for the heck of it was a rarity reserved for the extravagant or the eccentric.

This changed in 1986 when the govt introduced leave travel allowance, LTA, for public sector employees, which got extended to the private sector. The perk was meant to financially aid those in transferable jobs to make an annual return to home base. This gave an impetus to leisure travel.

Moving forward, liberalised foreign exchange has made travel abroad accessible to the growing middle class. The result is that the foreign-returned tag no longer has social cachet. That privilege is now reserved for the foreign non-returned – who leave the country and stay out through migration, legal or otherwise.

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