Tourist arrival down in Lumbini

By Laxman Paudel,Bhairahawa, Jan. 3: Despite strong figures at the national level, tourism in Gautam Buddha's birthplace of Lumbini has not recovered to pre-pandemic numbers yet. In 2019, the year before the COVID-19 entered Nepal, a total of 1,558,326 Nepali and foreign nationals came here. In 2023, only 998,938 did.