By Biswaraj Pattnaik, October 2, 2015 : Big talk in star hotels doesn’t attract tourists. Service providers and policy makers must realise that fabulously healthy, clean environment and truly caring behaviour alone can pull tourists.

There are numerous barren locations elsewhere in the world, without sea, river, hills or forests; but authorities have created paradise for tourists there only by providing delightful atmosphere by ensuring value for money services through highly affordable infrastructure and work forces with the most caring hearts.

Odisha cannot boast of any despite countless beaches, rivers, wetlands, hills with mind-boggling flora and fauna. It is rightly said one can witness nature in its full beauty and glory, sands of the deserts, forests, falls of the best kind and snows of the Himalaya. Daringbadi in Phulbani gives snows in winters. But the lack of ideas among the practitioners and appropriate political will has lead to tourism barrenness.

Nearly a decade ago, an elderly German tourist was heard talking nostalgically to a few Indian visitors about why this was his last annual trip to Puri after thirty years. The temple town on sea was his favourite haunt because until the late seventies of the last century, it was one of the calmest places on the living planet with an amazingly tempting sea with a very clean sandy shore. Beach hotels were few and primitive but hospitality was heavenly.

The greatest attraction was the ubiquitous cycle rickshaw which spewed no venomous, toxic fumes noisily while passengers sat compassionately behind the smiling puller who spoke delightful local English as guide, friend and philosopher. He took the guests to the truly value-for-money joints which served near-western food to please the predominantly European tongues.

Today all that is gone! Big heartless, scary hotels have come up like wild mushrooms to grab customers only by bribing the ill-behaved drivers of dangerously toxin-spewing auto rickshaws. The beach is permanently soiled with age-old litter and daily-piling human excreta to frighten even the filthiest devil among men. Every shopkeeper is an unscrupulous trader who charges maximum retail price to push garbage across the counter. The bus and other transport operators run business through thugs and incredibly immoral middlemen who steal nearly half the ticket price only for hooking gullible lower middle class customers from West Bengal and other neighbouring states.

There is a Chilka lagoon destination which has lost its original name Satpada and is called ‘Dolphin’ because there are a very few Irrawadi dolphins left struggling to survive against invasive motor boats with toxic oil spills, and nonstop noise. Lately, the dolphin number has dwindled so badly that super experts keep watching for months to keep count of hardly twenty-odd perpetually endangered dolphins due to loss of habitat. The greedy boat owners of the horribly mechanised boats fight among themselves to bribe taxi and bus drivers for getting business. Lastly the eateries, no matter what class or category, keep winking at the drivers, boatmen and crafty middlemen to shove in helplessly hungry tourists who by now have had punched pockets already.

The Hindu pilgrims in Puri come under oath never to come back again as the servitor community eats them up for extracting the last penny. Puri is the epicentre of a so called golden triangle with Lingaraj Temple at Bhubaneswar and Sun Temple at Konark as other two points with equally skilled exploiters deftly at work to impoverish tourists at one go. Foreign tourists from Europe have written off Puri for all this. They go to Goa and Kerala beaches. The tribal tourism has stopped after Maoist insurgency rose in intensity and ‘Christian conversion’ issues turned controversial.

After all this disturbing developments, the Odisha government keeps boasting of the world’s best tourism policy in place, which appeals to no tour-travel operator in the world. Odisha gets less than one percent of the foreign tourists in India. Officials scream of most tranquil beaches along an enviable 480km long coastline, towering temples, serpentine rivers and mighty waterfalls. But the foreigners’ footfall does not occur only because the poorest infrastructure and rudest host behaviour. ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’ is just a ‘parrot slogan’. Only 71,426 foreign tourists including Nepalese and Srilankans visited Odisha in 2014 out of the 7.4 crore who visited India. Every second week there is news of locals looting and beating up innocent tourists in the golden triangle locations.

In Las Vegas, the police is twenty-four hours alert; more so the tourist-friendly mafia which protects visitors in a manner that no criminal can survive. In Odisha everyone engaged in tourist business is an unscrupulous person save a very negligible few. But incidentally, the Odisha tourism officials are highly skilled in spending enormous sums of public money on tours to international travel fairs and organising meaningless media campaigns. The incumbent tourism minister says boastfully that countless foreigners would rush this year from Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Japan and several Gulf countries once the Biju Patnaik international airport becomes functional.

Further, tourism promotion remains a dream due to the lack of proper connectivity to remote ecological sites, inadequate number of affordable luxury hotels, and poor infrastructure at potential sites for the big size low-economy tourist community to prefer Odisha destinations.

Odisha is also fairly known for the ‘diamond Buddhist circuits’. There is good craze among young adventurous travellers for Eco-tourism at Similipal, Bhitarkanika, Tikarpada, Chilika, Chandaka- Nandankanan, Debrigarh and Kuldiha, which are loudly mentioned at seminars and business conferences without strategic planning and matching grant of money for related development. But most eco-tourism locations have no accommodation at all.

No one is clear what ‘tourism friendly’ policy has been framed to stun the demanding tourists from abroad. On what parameters they consider the policy so unique, no one knows. They don’t seem to learn from Thailand, Malaysia and even Srilanka where thinking heads are constantly at work to replicate good models. Odisha is perhaps the only Indian state endowed with some of the world’s most beautiful places like the Chilika Lagoon, Satkosia Gorge, Similipal forest ‘biosphere’, Bhitarkanika mangroves with rare crocodiles, Sonpur Beach in Ganjam, mountains, temples and strangest flora-fauna, apart from numerous ancient monuments, beaches, hot springs, wonderful water-bodies, forests with wide-ranging flora and fauna apart from several magnificent lesser known temples and palaces.
The tourism officials keep harping on the too known locations without developing facilities at amazing virgin places and training people to be well-behaved and compassionately caring hosts. Odisha is not a destination which you can cover in a ‘3 nights-4 days package’. At least a ‘6 night-7’ day package has to be popularised for enticing even the most unwilling traveller.

Travel related scams are more common than anywhere else in India. Cunning, manipulative scamsters orchestrate ingeniously to tempt the least willing traveller to cough up big money. As a result, tourists once duped mercilessly go back to share the worst experiences with potential visitors and the bad message spreads fast to mar business. Travel agencies, mostly unregistered and ‘fly by night’, charge excessive commission for train ticket racketeering operations. Some internet cafes are also used to dupe unsuspecting customers with fake train tickets. But when challenged on being caught, they turn rude and aggressive and don’t hesitate to intimidate victims for they are all petty criminal whom the police does not find big enough to nab. Odisha has the lousiest ‘tourist police’ just recently formed.

Simple travellers are usually taken for a ride by taxi drivers, who pretend to be confused and not sure of the location that the tourist wants to reach. The meter shows huge distance to facilitate easy robbery. Taxi drivers also persuade tourists to visit bribe-giving emporiums by promising special discounts on taxi fares. Needless to mention the bribe money far exceeds the discount on the ride.

Pre-paid taxi or travel services are yet to come in place. There are many massage centres claiming to provide authentic Ayurvedic massage treatment, most of which are just fake outfits likely to give customers bone fracture or a terrible muscle sprain or some other long lasting injury. There is no system or mechanism to know if the expensive massage outfits have genuine masseurs and herbal oils in place. There is no check on them by the tourist-police authorities.

Shockingly, rampant but hardly hardly talked about prostitution rackets now are very active in most popular tourist places. No one tells tourists to be particularly careful about seemingly consensual relationship with a local woman. After a couple of nights, the tourist could be accused of rape, with her relatives and friends intimidating and threatening of legal action to extract astronomical sums of money. But the authorities would say Odisha is pure like in 1860 AD.

Fake baba rackets : This is quite common in India. From astrology to know future to solutions for physical ailments, the babas claim to know everything. One popular baba outfit, now in big trouble, was declared a ‘Tourist Destination’ by the government of Odisha. As per law, whoever took this great decision could land in jail if public outcry gets loud enough, for In a secular country, no single faith ashram, hermitage or monastery can be patronised by the state agencies.

Puri is show-cased as the face of Hindu Odisha. But the most divine Lord Jagannath is forced to tolerate long-banned synthetic plastic bags in the temple premises. The town is one of the dirtiest among Hindu shrines of the world. The polythene litter on the beach, at all marketplaces and across the roads and lanes has caused gravest concern. Further, worried over the hazardous environment of Puri, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) has asked the State Government to take immediate steps to cleanse the city-mainly because of the effluents from hotels flowing perpetually into the sea and the solid garbage heaped everywhere with tons of smelly stuff fit enough to cause anesthesia on a single soft sniffing.

Even the water around the Jagannath Temple premises is so polluted that human consumption can cause illness. The NGT, after being alerted by the State Pollution Board, has asked for formation of a committee headed by the Chief Secretary and submit a report soon.

The WEF’s Travel and Tourism Report tosses around a lot of numbers as it tries to rank the success of the tourist industry in every nation on Earth, but the numbers that prove most interesting are the measures of “Affinity for Travel and Tourism,” which chart various peoples’ attitudes toward foreigners within the context of tourism’s economic impact on their countries. By leveling the playing ground — the “affinity” score doesn’t take into account whether there is anything in a country actually worth visiting — the report gives a rare view into which countries actually care about the tourists they attract.

And the countries that rank at the bottom for “Affinity” aren’t all war-torn or sub-Saharan. A Caribbean beach destination and a European power are among the 20 worst performers. China, meanwhile, came in with the 11th worst score overall, narrowly beating out Chad on the service front.

Visitors may see beautiful sites, experience lovely weather and have a great time, but if they don’t feel secure on cleanliness and physical safety, and if their complaints fall on deaf ears due to hostile and extornate thugs around, laudable tourism can never happen.