Sholto Ramsay has every reason to be irritated. He has been through it all. Sholto, who hails from Edinburgh and who has an office in Kerala, is a frequent visitor to India. But last time, it all went wrong; he couldn’t get his visa on time. He couldn’t make it to the Kerala Travel Mart, for which he had made plans and preparations. He’s now in India, making his team in Kerala work, salsa dance in between busy work schedules and to try to make them look at work from a different perspective. He wants his writers to make the most of their lives, he wants his tech team to learn from him and teach him in return, he wants his travel team to beat the heat and work wonders as they were wont to do. He walks along, munching a sandwich or drinking his favourite black coffee and keeping an eye on his team members here, most of whom are happy sitting glued to their seats and with eyes fixed on their monitors, typing out things as if in a trance.
Ask Sholto about visa and India, and he waxes indignant, “You can visit Sri Lanka, you can visit Pakistan, you can visit Ethiopia, you can visit anywhere in the Emirates, It’s so simple. You can get a tourist visa very easily: you get it delivered to you on arrival. But with India, it’s not so! With India, you have to pay 50 pounds for a tourist visa, wait for one week after sending in the application and you even must attach photos that are non-standard size ones”. He wonders whether all this is happening in the name of combating terrorism or some such thing, all of which can be done in a different way perhaps.
Says Sholto, “The Indian government should start to think about how this impacts tourism and to do something about it!. The Indian tourism industry is not as big as is usually thought, in fact it’s a relatively small one. For example more people visit Edinburgh, a city of 500,000, than visit the whole of India in a year! There is no question of people from Britain coming here and staying here, without ever thinking of going back. It’s not at all like that. The process should be made easy, so that you just need to spend less money and not go through all these tedious procedures”.
Anger justified indeed! Let’s hope people don’t tick off India from their itinerary due to such issues and opt to go visit countries with easier visa procedures, thereby incurring for India big losses.
Mark Scott, Sholto’s partner and a frequent India visitor himself, says, “The tourist visa costs India more money in lost revenue than it gains in visa revenue!! Sholto told me they actually send back visa requests because the standard passport photo is the wrong size. How crazy is that!!! So people go to other countries instead where we don’t need a visa. The hotels should put pressure on the government to get rid of the visa application thing. Places like Thailand and Sri Lanka don’t need them. So if you had to choose where would you go? Somewhere where you have to send your passport off and pay to get a visa? Or to a country who says we love tourist just come here and spend your money?”
Points to ponder indeed! And it’s high time India found answers to these questions and many more that visitors to India stop to ask. It’s high time something is done…
