If there's one thing that puts off tourists who come to India, especially from the West, it is the lack of cleanliness in public places. Now the ministry of tourism plans to shame our cities into cleaning up their act. Starting next year, it will come out with a cleanliness index which will rank Indian cities in order of how clean they are. This was revealed at a press conference organised on Friday by Shripad Naik who holds independent charge of the ministries of culture and tourism on the occasion of the NDA government completing 100 days in power.
The first such index, a limited exercise involving 10 cities, will come out early next year, to be followed by a more thorough ranking of 150 towns and municipalities in 2016. "The methodology has been identified. We are not going to tell you which are the dirtiest cities, but certainly which are the cleanest. Hopefully, it will shame those who are the bottom of the list to at least try to be second dirtiest," said Parvez Dewan, secretary, ministry of tourism.
Among the other significant announcement made was that the home ministry had given in-principle approval to the ministry's long-standing proposal to allow satellite phones for tourism purposes in remote destinations such as Lakshwadeep. "This will be a huge benefit to adventure tourists," Dewan said.
The minister also detailed out other new initiatives such as electronic visa on arrival, an upgraded Incredible India website in eight international and the formulation of guidelines for golf tourism.
Foreign tourist arrivals have picked up in the three months of NDA rule, said Naik, with a growth rate of 9%, 12.9% and 16.9%, respectively, compared to 2013. Earnings in foreign exchange had also rised by around 17.4%, 19.3% and 26.8%, respectively, for these months compared to last year.
Yoga may soon be listed as "world heritage". The union culture ministry, said secretary Ravinder Singh, will soon begin working on a dossier to list yoga on the UNESCO heritage list. The ministry will also mark the centenaries this year of Komagata Maru, a Japanese ship carrying 340 Sikhs that was not allowed to land in Canada, and Begum Akhtar.
Singh revealed that the ministry had vacated the legal stay on Salarjung Museum and Anthropological Survey of India, and heads for these institutions would be appointed soon.
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