| The idea developed from a chat about the viability of the Sagarmala Project. If Sagarmala gets going, the Indian seacoast will be dotted by ports, with 75 km distance between one and the next. |
| If the National Highway Development Project, the Inland Waterways Development Project and the Gram Sadak Yojana all come through, those ports will be connected by decent roads, which in turn, will be serviced by petrol-pump superstores and motels. |
| "Suppose, some of us get together and organise a yacht?" said my friend. "We could take a coast-to-coast jaunt, 'inspecting' various nodes of Sagarmala and write it all off to expenses as well! We can stop where we like, hang around or carry on as we want. We wouldn't even be out of touch, what with mobile Net and Satphones." |
| Discounting the obsession with tax-breaks, which is probably a nervous twitch developed by anybody who has to deal with Scottish widows, it's an interesting idea. It would be a little akin to "The Great Railway Bazar". Only, instead of doing India by rail, you do it by sea. |
| Contrary to general notions, a yacht doesn't need to cost a great deal. You can buy or build a perfectly serviceable six-seater yacht for perhaps twice what you would pay for a heavy truck. If you do your own crewing, which is quite possible in the given case of coast-hugging, short-range jaunts in clement weather, the travel itself would be cheap. Far cheaper and safer, in fact, than driving the same distances. |
| It is a pity that most ports are eyesores. There is little to see in Tuticorin, Vizag or Kandla, for instance. Cochin Harbour is vitiated by the presence of hundreds of child prostitutes. There is Goa, of course "" and vast stretches of virgin coastline will suddenly become approachable. |
| Who knows? There could be a little fishing village somewhere in Tamil Nadu or Orissa or Maharashtra or Gujarat that approximates to your vision of paradise. Or, rather than hire a hotel room, you may find it is more fun to lie off the coast and hit the hotspots in Mumbai or Pondicherry. (Women, for some reason, are more amenable to nightcaps on boat-bunks than on hotel beds.) |
| Doing something like this right now would be a nightmare. On vast stretches of coastline, docking and fuelling facilities are non-existent. And there are no road connections worth the name out of many small places. |
| The yachting-trip concept is directly related to infrastructure development "" Sagarmala opens up the vista of such journeys. Most tourism is infrastructure-related. For every traveller willing to hang from the roof of a country bus and squat behind rocks to perform their natural functions, there are several dozen who want to be chauffeured to a room with an attached bath and running hot and cold. The lack of even basic amenities has always held back tourism in India. |
| The other thing with tourism is that people do want value for money. Unfortunately, India doesn't deliver too often even on that account because of our cockeyed taxation policy. It is absurd that it costs less for a Delhi-wallah to have a five-star holiday in Malaysia or Thailand (both of which are more prosperous than India) than in Goa or Kovalam. |
| If plane fares and hotel rates were allowed to come down, tourism would boom. Globally, tourism is one of the biggest employers "" the very biggest, perhaps. It generates far more jobs than call centres. It could be the one thing that ensures Indian growth isn't a jobless wonder. |
| My friend is already pricing fibreglass hulls and used Merlin engines. People with bigger ideas should be looking for super-annuated Caribbean cruise ships! |
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