India is a perfectly safe country for women, says Tourism Minister Alphons
Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Tourism, K J Alphons on Tuesday questioned the credibility of the recent survey that labelled India as the most dangerous country in the world for women.
Alphons, who has set an ambitious target to step up Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs), asserted that India is a perfectly safe place for tourists. “I travel 25 days a month and go to the remotest corners and talk to lot of people. And, we are trying every day to make things better. 2017 was an amazing year for India tourism. We had 10.1 million foreign tourists arriving here. If I actually count NRIs and people of Indian origin, it adds up to 16.5 millon people who arrived in India. Our revenue receipts from foreign tourists went up by 20.8 per cent, which is about four times more than the global increase. We had a revenue of US$27 billion from foreign tourists alone, which approximately is Rs1,80,000 crore,” he said.
An IAS officer of the Kerala cadre, Alphons reasoned it is not safe to judge a huge country like India on the basis of isolated incidents. “In a massive country like India, with a population of 1.3 billion, isolated incidents are bound to happen. If you are going to write a threepage article in a leading newspaper in New York. Is this the biggest thing happening that you are talking about when you have gunning happening in your backyard. Incidents which have happened and are happening are extremely unfortunate, and unacceptable but let me tell you that the foreign media has been hugely discriminatory. I have another better word for it. I don’t want to compare numbers and say that your New York City, Paris or London has more such incidents because any such incident is bad. Take for example the report that India is most unsafe place for women travellers. We have asked the Thomson Reuters Foundation. We said you give us a list of the 548 people interviewed. They said no. I can assure you that these socalled 43 women activists they interviewed are hardcore Left activists who do not like my Prime Minister.” Dismissing the survey as “inappropriate and unethical’, he asked “What kind of a survey did they do?”
The minister said it is very unfortunate that the global media is so discriminatory but does not care to report favourable interventions made by the government when foreigners are attacked.
“These incidents are unfortuntate. I am not justifying them. There was a threepage article on the Fatehpur Sikri incident in one of the biggest newspapers in the world. I think the global media is hugely discriminatory and the Indian media is also responsible. Just because they think India to be backward, they can write anything they want.”