Thứ Sáu, 14 tháng 6, 2013

Rahul pitches for easier visa regime

Rahul Gandhi in Amethi on Thursday. (PTI)


New Delhi, June 13: Foreigners thinking of visiting India could find their host a bit friendlier, thanks to Rahul Gandhi who appears to have thrown his weight behind easing visa norms.


The Congress vice-president met tourism minister K. Chiranjeevi and home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde earlier this week to sort out bottlenecks, prompting the two ministers to meet again the next day.


Sources said Rahul has been pressing for relaxing visa norms to create more jobs at a time elections are less than a year away. They said Rahul quoted a study by America’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which found that for every 65 new visas issued, one job is created.


In India’s context, sources said, the figure is one job for every 30 visas.


Rahul’s prod has also come at a time a series of sexual assaults on foreign women has raised questions on their safety while travelling alone in the country.


The Congress leader met Chiranjeevi and Shinde on Tuesday, when the three discussed visa-related matters bogging the tourism industry down. Yesterday, after the two ministers had met again, the tourism ministry submitted a list of 102 countries, demanding visa-on-arrival facilities for visitors from as many of these nations as possible.


The facility is now available to visitors from 11 countries: Singapore, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Japan, Finland, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar.


The tourism ministry has also requested that visa application forms should be available in six Unesco languages: Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, French, Russian and English. Forms are now available only in English.


The government has agreed in-principle to visa application forms in all the six Unesco languages. On visa-on-arrival, the home ministry has been non-committal, saying it was “examining” the list.


In the last six months, however, the government has taken steps to relax visa norms. First, it waived the 60-day cool-off period. Under earlier rules, no one with a tourist visa could return to India within two months of visiting the country.


Second, the visa-on-arrival facility has been extended from four airports — New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta — to five more: Goa, Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Bangalore. Tourists can also pay their visa fees by credit card.


While eased visa norms should help attract more tourists, the sexual assaults did appear to have a negative impact. “If a woman tourist is travelling alone to a remote area of India, it would be in their interest to inform the nearest police station,” Chiranjeevi told The Telegraph.


On March 16, a 39-year-old Swiss national was gang-raped by six men in Madhya Pradesh. Three days later, a 25-year-old British tourist jumped off her hotel window to escape the manager’s advances.



Rahul pitches for easier visa regime

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