Incredible India

The tourism authorities in India are tightening security to prevent groping hands of sexual perverts from spoiling the experience of holidaymakers lured to the country with a promise of 'Incredible India!'

Top tourism officials, including those in charge of Goa and Kerala states on India's western seaboard which are top draws with beach tourists, have been summoned to New Delhi for intensive consultations.

They will discuss steps to address a menace that threatens to take the sheen off a global advertising campaign which drew five million tourists to India last year and earned the country more than US$12 billion (S$17 billion).

Some 80,000 of those tourists had travelled from Singapore, according to government estimates.

News reports suggest that more than 10 foreign women were molested in various parts of India in the first two weeks of this year.

In the latest incident, a British woman was reportedly raped in Goa on Friday night, just days after a Russian woman was molested there. The beach shack owner who molested the Russian woman has been arrested while police have released an identity sketch of the rape suspect, news reports said.

Chief Minister Digamber Kamat has vowed to nail the culprit in 48 hours.

'We are adopting zero tolerance in such cases,' he told reporters on Sunday. 'We are dealing with each case seriously.'

Goa gained a reputation in the 1960s and 1970s as the favoured watering hole for hippies and marijuana users. Today, thousands of upmarket tourists throng the place.

The Goa incidents came even as a 12-year-old Indian-Canadian girl and her older sister were groped by a security guard at a resort hotel in Kumarakom, a popular tourist destination in the southern state of Kerala.

The guard, 27-year-old Shyju Varghese, was arrested hours after the girls' father lodged a complaint on Sunday. However, the traumatised family chose to end their holiday early and returned to Canada.

Mr V. Venu, Kerala's top official for tourism, told The Straits Times in a telephone interview: 'We cannot condone a single incident, even if it is a lewd remark.

'The hotel that employed the security guard had been careless in outsourcing security. We cannot stop the odd pervert but this one seemed like it could have been avoided.'

Kerala, India's most literate state, is among the country's fastest-growing tourism spots. Last year, it drew 500,000, or 10 per cent, of India's foreign tourists.

The state, particularly its most popular Kovalam beach, had a rash of molest cases in the mid-1990s but a high level of vigilance by the authorities had almost rubbed out the menace.

Of late, however, some cases have surfaced.

On New Year's Eve in the port city of Kochi, formerly Cochin, a beach party was marred by the groping of a young Swedish tourist.

'We are enjoying Kerala and having a good time,' the father of the child told a television reporter who was filming in the area. 'But even as we speak my 15-year-old daughter has just had her behind grabbed by a man.'

Even Mumbai, which shares a reputation with Bangalore as being safe for women, has had some adverse attention lately.

On New Year's Day, readers of the Hindustan Times in New Delhi and Mumbai awoke to screaming headlines that read: 'Shame Old Story'.

The daily catalogued the travails of two young couples who wandered out from the discotheque of the JW Marriott hotel in Mumbai.

A mob on the beach outside laid hands on the women, even as their menfolk tried to protect them. Mumbai police have since picked up several men, using the newspaper photographs as evidence.

ZERO TOLERANCE

'We cannot condone a single incident, even if it is a lewd remark. The hotel that employed the security guard had been careless in outsourcing security. We cannot stop the odd pervert but this one seemed like it could have been avoided.'

MR V. VENU, Kerala's top official for tourism, after a security guard in Kerala molested two Indian-Canadian girls.