How best to discourage tourists from visiting India

A friend's message prompts the following thought.

"How to most thoroughly discourage tourists from visiting India" must have been the subject of several intensive brainstorming sessions for the best minds of India over several years.

The results have been very thoroughly implemented.

It is no longer possible, for example, to get a visa by post in the UK.

So, wherever in the UK you live, whether relatively nearby (say an hour away, in another part of London) or across the water in e.g. Northern Ireland), you have to first arrange to travel to London, then you have to arrive at the office during working hours, join the long queue to submit your papers, stay somewhere overnight, and come back to join the queue the next morning for (you hope!) your visa. That's two days. A pity that India's best brains could not come up with something more complicated, so that it would take longer - and several more visits.

However, India's best minds haven't done too bady. Naturally, there is no guarantee that the visa will be issued. Bureaucrats can usually find something wrong with your application - for example, that the signature is too large or that there is something not quite right with the photo.

This is real progress for the tourist industry. So now a much greater number of tourists from the UK can be expected in India than in the bad old days.

Very good for the country during the global economic crisis, and other sources of income for the country are going to be limited anyway. Sphere: Related Content