India has announced a series of measures designed to ensure the safety of female tourists, in the wake of a series of recent attacks on women in the country.
In 2013 a Swiss tourist was gang-raped in Madhya Pradesh, then in January 2014 a similar attack was carried out on a Danish tourist in Delhi. These recent incidents, and several others, followed the rape and murder of British teenager Scarlett Keeling in Goa in 2008.
And India’s new government has recognised that these attacks are damaging the country’s reputation overseas, and hindering the growth of the Indian tourism industry.
As a result, India’s Ministry of Tourism has now unveiled a series of new measures to protect female tourists – both domestic and international.
These include the funding of new Tourist Facilitation & Security Organisations (TFSO) in the states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, and the adoption of new ‘Code of Conduct for Safe & Honourable Tourism’, which contains a set of guidelines to encourage tourism operators to respect tourist dignity and safety.
Letters have been sent to the chief ministers of all India’s state governments, urging them to take “immediate effective steps for ensuring… a friendly environment for all tourists” and to “publicise the steps being taken/proposed to be taken to increase the sense of security amongst… visitors and also to counter the negative publicity”.
Last year a study by India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry said that international tourist visits to the country had dropped 25% in the three months after the 2012 rape and murder of a woman in Delhi. Visits by women fell by 35%.
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