Why tourism is a flourishing industry in India

A few days back, I was in Gujrat for two weeks as part of a consulting project. I was in Baroda over a weekend. I decided to go visit the famous Lakshmi Vilas palace – the palace of India’s second richest princely state at the time of independence. It is a grand palace with beautiful interiors, the light from the tallest tower being visible from 14 kilometres away (reputedly), sprawling golf course surrounding it on all sides, and a lot of associated history.

There were two gates around three fourths of a kilometer away from each other. There were no signboards in front of (or anywhere near) either the gates.
Nor were there any auto, taxi or hand-rickshaw stands near either of the entrances.

I got down at one of the two entrances which seemed more likely to be the one for tourists.

A few steps inside, and I was stopped by a guard who told me that it was not the entrance for the common public. I was asked to enter through the other gate.

I walked till the other gate. This time the guard did not turn me back – he asked for tickets instead. The ticket counter, I was told, was approachable through the other gate – the one that I had just frequented a few minutes back.

Ideally, they should have a ticket selling counter at each of the gates – atleast at the main gate (and the one nearest to the city).

Being a very enthusiastic traveler, I decided to keep my tryst with destiny. I walked all the way to the first gate once again. In a span of half an hour, after having walked more than a kilometer and a half, I was at the first gate for a second time.

The guard there mentioned a ticket counter a few hundred metres away. I gave him a good hearing for not volunteering that information the first time – obviously just knowing the correct entrance to the palace would not have done without the tickets. Who else could have provided that information especially since the information not being put on any visible point anywhere in the vicinity.

But then that is how tourism is handled in parts of India – no attempt to make things easier for the visitors. And apparently, we are the originators of the concept called ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’.

And it is here that I was dejected once again. The road to the ticket counter was (i) a ‘kuchcha’ road and not a proper road, (ii) it did not have adequate signboards, (iii) it was flanked by tall wild grasses on both sides, (iv)it was highly serpentine and convoluted with many baffling diversions to fool people at every few metres. After having walked for over 10 minutes, I finally reached a cottage which issued the tickets, and where I learnt that I just had 45 minutes to spend in the palace (out of which half an hour would be spent on walking to the second of the two entrances mentioned before)

The high temperatures in India mean that tourists move out late in the day – and the tourist attractions manned by the archeological or tourism departments close at just that hour.

I was lucky to bump into an auto-rickshaw and was able to spend time at the palace. The road from the entrance (the other one) to the palace was not repaired for years (just like the road to the cottage issuing the tickets). And the gardens between the entrance and the palace looked more like forests.

All these experiences meant that I hardly had any expectations left from that place – I was in for a pleasant surprise. Everything was so well managed from that point onwards. There were guides inside the palace who were introducing people to the different mysteries of the palace and the nearby areas. And the interiors were well maintained too. They even sent a separate guide for me just because everyone else in my group was Marathi and preferred a Marathi guide (and mind you, Marathi was not the local language there). Such excellence actually anguished me even further – if they can spend so much on palace interiors, the guides and the golf course, why can’t they make one-time-investments and put another ticket counter at the main entrance, repair the road and clear up the garden-turned-forest hiding the palace from the front.

It is no wonder that India just gets close to 4 million foreign visitors every year compared to 300 million for the city of Paris alone. You might be tempted to argue that this difference should be discounted because of the small sizes, small populations and geographical proximity of countries in western Europe - every other person there is a foreigner. Wait! You have not heard the clinching argument – three fourths of foreigners coming to India are not the preferred ‘firangis’ tourists but are our brethren from Bangladesh.

Two words sum up the dismal way tourism is handled in India (ironically the same words chosen by the department of tourism of the government of India to promote India) – Incredible India.
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Dear readers from outside India (if there are any), things are not as badly managed in most tourist attractions in India. The above example stood out blatantly and I could not but mention it. I have always and I will always continue promoting India as a tourist destination to every foreigner that I meet (unless of course a lot more such negative experiences happen).


For more information on the palace, please visit the wikipedia site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laxmi_Vilas_Palace