On September 27, there was big talk among officials and hospitality guys about Odisha being a highly-preferred international tourist destination at a routine get-together in Bhubaneswar.
Nearly a decade ago, an elderly German tourist was heard talking nostalgically to a few Indian visitors about why this was his last annual trip to Puri after thirty years. The temple town on sea was his favourite haunt because until the late Seventies of the last century, it was one of the calmest places on the living planet with an amazingly tempting sea with a very clean sandy shore. Beach hotels were few and primitive, but hospitality was heavenly. The greatest attraction was the ubiquitous cycle-rickshaw which spewed no venomous, toxic fumes noisily while passengers sat compassionately behind the smiling puller who spoke delightful local English as guide, friend and philosopher. He took the guests to the truly value-for-money joints which served near-Western food to please the predominantly European tongues.
Today all that is gone! Big heartless, scary hotels have come up like wild mushrooms to grab customers only by bribing the ill-behaved drivers of dangerously toxin-spewing auto-rickshaws. The beach is permanently soiled with age-old litter and daily-piling human excreta to frighten even the filthiest devil among men. Shopkeepers are unscrupulous traders who charge maximum retail price to push garbage across the counter. The bus and other transport operators run business through thugs and incredibly immoral middlemen who steal nearly half the ticket price only for hooking gullible lower middleclass customers from West Bengal and other neighbouring States.
There is a Chilka lagoon destination which has lost its original name Satpada and is called 'Dolphin' because there are a very few Irawati dolphins left struggling to survive against invasive motorboats with toxic oil spills and nonstop noise. lately, the dolphin number has dwindled so badly that super experts keep watching for months to keep count of hardly twenty-odd perpetually endangered Irawati dolphins due to loss of habitat. The greedy boat owners of the horribly mechanised boats fight among themselves to bribe taxi and bus drivers for getting business. lastly, the eateries, no matter what class or category, keep winking at the drivers, boatmen and crafty middlemen to shove in helplessly hungry tourists who by now have had punched pockets already.
The Hindu pilgrims in Puri come under oath never to come back again as the servitor community eats them up by extracting the last penny. Puri is the epicentre of a so-called Golden Triangle with Bhubaneswar and Konark as the other two points with equally-skilled exploiters deftly at work to impoverish tourists at one go. Foreign tourists from Europe have written off Puri for all this. They go to the beaches of Goa and Kerala. The tribal tourism has stopped after Maoist insurgency rose in intensity and 'Christian conversion' issues turned controversial.
After all these disturbing developments, the Odisha Government keeps boasting of the world's best tourism policy in place, which appeals to no tour-travel operator in the world. With a 480-km coastline, Odisha gets less than one per cent of the foreign tourists in India. Tourist officials scream of most tranquil beaches, towering temples, serpentine rivers and mighty waterfalls. But the foreigners' footfall does not occur only because the poorest infrastructure and rudest host behaviour. 'Atithi Devo Bhava' is just a 'parrot slogan'. Every second week, there is news of locals looting and beating up innocent tourists in the Golden Triangle locations. In las Vegas, the police is twenty-four hours alert; more so the tourist-friendly mafia which protects visitors in a manner that no criminal can survive. In Odisha, everyone engaged in tourist business is an unscrupulous person save a very negligible few.
Only 71,426 foreign tourists including Nepalese and Sri lankans visited Odisha in 2014 out of the 7,40,00,000 who visited India. But incidentally, the Odisha tourism officials are highly skilled in spending enormous sums of public money on tours to international travel fairs and organising meaningless media campaigns. The incumbent Tourism Minister says boastfully that countless foreigners would rush this year from Thailand, Indonesia, Sri lanka, Japan and several Gulf countries once the Biju Patnaik International Airport becomes truly functional.
Experts attribute factors like the lack of proper connectivity to remote eco-tourism sites, inadequate number of luxury and star hotels and poor infrastructure at potential sites for the low-economy big number tourist community inflow. Odisha is also fairly known for the 'Diamond Buddhist Circuits'.
There is good craze among young adventurous travellers for ecotourism at Similipal, Bhitarkanika, Tikarpada, Chilika, Chandaka-Nandankanan, Debrigarh and Kuldiha, which are loudly mentioned at seminars and business conferences without strategic planning and matching grant of money for related development. Most ecotourism locations have no accommodation at all. No one is clear what 'tourism-friendly' policy has been framed to stun the demanding tourists from abroad. On what parameters they consider the policy so unique, no one knows. They don’t seem to learn from Thailand, Malaysia and even Sri lanka where thinking heads are constantly at work to replicate good models.
Odisha is perhaps the only Indian State endowed with a 480-km-long coastline and some of the world’s most beautiful places like the Chilika lagoon, Satkosia gorge, Similipal forest 'biosphere', Bhitarkanika mangroves with rare crocodiles, Sonpur beach in Ganjam, mountains, temples and strangest flora-fauna, apart from numerous ancient monuments, beaches, hot springs, wonderful water-bodies and forests with wide-ranging flora and fauna. The tourism officials keep harping on the too-known locations without developing facilities and training people to be well-behaved and compassionate hosts. Odisha is not a destination which you can cover in a '3 night-4-day package'. One has to plan at least a 10 night-11-day package for getting to know the real beauty of the region.
Travel-related scams are more common than anywhere else in India. Cunning, manipulative scamsters orchestrate ingeniously to tempt the least willing traveller to cough out big money. As a result, tourists once duped mercilessly go back to share the worst experiences with potential visitors and the bad message spreads fast to mar business. Travel agencies, mostly unregistered and 'fly-by-night', charge excessive commission for train ticket racketeering operations. Some internet cafes are also used to dupe unsuspecting customers with fake train tickets. But when challenged on being caught, they turn rude and aggressive and don't hesitate to intimidate victims for they are all petty criminal whom the police do not find big enough to nab. Odisha has the lousiest 'tourist police' just recently formed.
Simple travellers are usually taken for a ride by taxi drivers, who pretend to be confused and not sure of the location that the tourist wants to reach. The meter shows huge distance to facilitate easy robbery. Taxi drivers also persuade tourists to visit bribe-giving emporiums by promising special discounts on taxi fares. Pre-paid taxi or travel services are yet to come in place.
There are many massage centres claiming to provide authentic Ayurvedic massage treatment, most of which are just fake outfits likely to give customers bone fracture or a terrible muscle sprain or some other long-lasting injury. There is no system or mechanism to know if the expensive massage outfits have genuine masseurs and herbal oils in place. Shockingly, rampant but hardly-talked-about prostitution rackets now are very active in most popular tourist places.
No one tells tourists to be particularly careful about seemingly consensual relationship with a local woman. After a couple of nights, the tourist could be accused of rape, with her relatives and friends intimidating and threatening of legal action to extract astronomical sums of money.
Fake Baba rackets: From astrology to know future to solutions for physical ailments, the Babas claim to know everything. One popular Baba outfit, now in big trouble, was declared a 'Tourist Destination' by the State Government. Whoever took this great decision could land in jail if public outcry gets loud enough, for in a secular country, no single-faith ashram, hermitage or monastery can be patronised by State agencies.
Puri is showcased as the face of Hindu Odisha. But lord Jagannath is forced to tolerate long-banned synthetic plastic bags in the temple premises. The town is one of the dirtiest among Hindu shrines of the world. The polythene litter on the beach, at all marketplaces and across the roads has caused gravest concern. The National Green Tribunal has asked the Government to take immediate steps to cleanse the city, mainly because of the effluents from hotels flowing perpetually into the sea and the solid garbage heaped everywhere. Even the water around the Jagannath Temple premises is so polluted that human consumption can cause illness. The NGT, after being alerted by the State Pollution Board, has asked for formation of a committee headed by the Chief Secretary and submit a report soon.
(The writer is a core member of Transparency International, Odisha)