The Hindu Business Line : Reality circuit takes seat in the tourism bandwagon

Squatter's colonies, old vegetable markets, unemployed youth hanging around at street corners through the day, active anti-globalisation movements, proactive zilla parishads, anything and everything could put a locality on the tourist map these days.

India is slowly getting into the reality tour circuit. There was some furore when a Mumbai-based company jointly owned by a UK-resident and an Indian started offering tours of Asia's largest slum Dharavi since January this year. "The idea is to dispel the myth that Dharavi is simply a place of poverty and squalor," says Mr Krishnan Pujari, partner of the company.

He says the concentration is on the industry and enterprise there and not poverty. Tourists are taken in lots of not more than five to make for unobtrusive groups and are told not to take photographs.

His Web site and a few posters near the popular hangout of overseas visitors, Leopold's in Colaba, bring him tourists. The itinerary covers various cottage industries in the area, from cloth dyeing activities to foodstuff manufacture. Eighty per cent of the profits from this tour package go to charity, says Mr Pujari.

Indian packages

Global Exchange, an international human rights organisation "dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world" organises reality tours worldwide.

Two Indian packages are scheduled for 2007 on its Web site. One is a Gandhian tour that includes (apart from the standard Sabarmati Ashram, Mani Bhavan etc.,) a trip to Sangli in Maharashtra to see grassroots projects in agriculture, as well as a trip to the Vandana Shiva centre, "established by Indian physicist and activist Dr Vandana Shiva, a leader in the resistance movement to corporate-dominated globalisation".

The trip at $2,600 per head in country, excluding international flight fares, includes stay at three-star places and above, and ends with a trip to the Taj Mahal.

The other one is an in-depth study tour of Kerala to see how the State has living standards on par with the developing world with an annual income one-seventieth that of the US.

The two-week tour will cover "the full range of the unique qualities of this small, densely populated State, from the foundations of the mid-1950s democratic socialist system to the new decentralised planning schemes, from village matrilineal structures to flourishing women's self-help projects, from a look at nagging, chronic unemployment to activists of the people's science movement."

There is also a visit to Dinesh Bidi, described as the largest worker's cooperative in the world (nearly all women), "to see true workplace empowerment in action."

Global Exchange organises trips to several third world countries, including a women's delegation to Afghanistan to witness the self-generated transformation of women's roles in Afghan Society.

Culinary tours

Culinary tours of India are also becoming popular. Delhi-based ETC Tours and Travels organises custom-made culinary trips for foreign travellers who also participate in the cooking.

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