Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, Mr. Raja Pervez Ashraf, Prime Minister of Pakistan, secretary@cabinet.gov.pk or pspm@pmsectt.gov.pk

Re: INDIA/PAKISTAN: Remove the abnormal visa restrictions to ensure right to travel and trade

Dear respectful Prime Ministers,

I am William Nicholas Gomes, Human Rights Ambassador for Salem-News.com.

I am writing to express concern regarding the issue raised by Aman ki Asha , a campaign for peace between India and Pakistan, jointly initiated by the Jang Group of Pakistan and The Times of India Group on January 1, 2010.

They have lunched an online petition in www.change.org.

As you know the people of Indian and Pakistani descent living in other countries, demand the right to visit our families across the border in ‘the other country’ – to see our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and, in some cases, our children. I demand the right to travel in the countries of our ancestors, to walk along coastlines and roads that represent our collective past, to seek and spread harmony across a subcontinent not divided by politics and propaganda. In this modern age of interdependence, it is a tragedy that the citizens of India and Pakistan are left peering over a border made indomitable and intimidating. There is little space for the hand of friendship to be extended across this border. We demand that this be changed.

I urge the governments of India and Pakistan to:

• Allow long-term visas, especially to people with families and spouses across the border and to applicants who meet the visa criteria;
• Allow visa on arrival to senior citizens and families, particularly children;
• Allow tourist visas between India and Pakistan;
• Make police reporting on arrival and departure the exception rather than the rule;
• Do away with the requirement of entry and exit from the same point, using the same mode of transport;
• Allow visas to be valid for the entire country (subject to reasonable restrictions) rather than one or two cities;
• Immediately reopen the Mumbai and Karachi consulates, and consider opening more consulates in major cities;
• Make student visas freely available;
• Curtail unnecessary paperwork;
• Ease visa restrictions for citizens of other countries who are of Indian or Pakistani descent, dual nationals, or expatriates from each other’s countries.

In addition, we urge the governments to do away with restrictions that are completely outdated in today’s cyber world, and to:

• Allow more than two journalists each to be based in each other’s countries;
• Undo the ban on cell-phone roaming;
• Undo the ban on cross-border media, television and publications.

The authorities must refrain from trying to control the movements of their people, when their minds are free. It is mutual trust and genuine collaboration that will enable us to break from the past and repudiate the legacy of hatred and animosity. I can truly progress when ideas and art, business and tourism, and collaboration in the fields of health, sustainability and poverty alleviation are allowed to flourish and flow. Only then can our people and countries reach their full potential.

AUTHOR: William Nicholas Gomes
URL: www.williamgomes.org
E-MAIL: williamgomes.org [at] gmail.com

AUTHOR: Shreedeep Rayamajhi
URL: http://www.rayznews.com
E-MAIL: weaker41 [at] gmail.com

Image from Flickr courtesy Rainer Ebert

This year I had been put under a lot of stress because of work, volunteerism and family affairs. It was inevitable that a holiday was on the cards. I have been to India for a quite a number of time but my family was not that lucky. And we always wanted to be at the Tajmahal together. So India it is.

And we will do this differently this time. One of our family friends has prior experience of traveling to India by car and the family has joined us. We have decided that we will do it the adventurous way.

Travelling to India by car is not a common phenomenon, especially because of strict tax regime in both the countries. I read recently that a car of a Bangladeshi traveler who drove home after travelling across many countries was confiscated by customs because the validity of his paper ran out. He could not release the car as it is subject to huge import tax (105%-300% according to Horsepower and age).

But the process of getting a permission to take your car to India and bring it back without paying duty  is fairly easy if you know how.

You will need an International Driver’s Licence to travel to India (which is virtually surrounding Bangladesh). To take your vehicle across the border you need a carnet de passage en douane. It is a document from the motoring organisation in the country in which the vehicle is registered, which says you will not sell the vehicle abroad without paying import duties.

In Bangladesh this permission is dealt by the Automobile Association of Bangladesh (AAB) [contact information here]. We had to give a bank guarantee of an assumed value of the car in favor of AAB, paid a permit charge of BDT 10,000/- (roughly $130) and the International Driving License Fee – BDT 2,500 (valid for one year) which is issued against your existing valid driving license. The whole process takes around 10 days.

The Indian Visa process has become very complicated due to their new online system which is unable to handle loads of requests. We managed to complete all the formalities after a lot of drama (but will save it for a later rant).

Those of you who have experience of travelling to India by air and by road knows that there is a clear discrimination in the ways immigration and customs are handled in both sides of the borders. I always tell my acquaintances to avoid the road borders because it involves lots of delays, harassment etc. But you never know things may have changed in the recent years. So I will be posting updates about our journey and hope that I will not be put under stress during travel. 

AUTHOR: Rezwan
URL: http://rezwanul.blogspot.com/
E-MAIL: i_rezwan [at] hotmail.com

He urged other stakeholders to contribute towards these efforts by producing quality goods that will be worth drawing the attention of buyers in the world market.

“We cannot rely on the Government alone to bring changes in the tourism industry but all stakeholders like travel agencies, tourist hotels, game reserves and national parks in their own right to contribute towards these efforts,” he said.

Charles Lupilya the CEO of the Dar es Salaam Tourism Executive Board said that tourism in this country is affected by many factors; he mentioned those as poor infrastructure, lack of qualified staff in dealing with tourism matters, and power blackouts.

He revetaled that if tourists are affected by power blackout in major city centres of this country like Dar es Salaam, Arusha and Mwanza it is easy for them to conclude that the situation is even worse in the tourist hotels located in game reserves and Tanzania National Parks.

He was also concerned that the heavy traffic jam particularly in Dar es Salaam which is already affected by warm climate could add much to the embarrassments that tourists suffers whenever they visit Tanzania.

However Lupilya said that this country could earn a lion of share its incomes once citizens are empowered to understand that tourism is not only to do with tourist hotels, because there are many avenues like cultural tourism which can be promoted through arts and other linking techniques.

“We should learn from others like Brazilians who have turned Samba into an international dance which has attracted many all over the world to visit that country for learning how to dance such a unique style. Lupilya urged Tanzanian to capitalize on preparing quality souvenirs which is part of mechanisms to promote tourism. He lauded carvers and drawers who have managed to promote well this country through carvings and tinga tinga drawings.

On her part Ms Renata Anacleth sales officer with Afrika Sana said that some dealers in the tourism industry are a hindrance towards promotion of this country because they produce poor quality goods. She asked those who dealing in sales of tie and dye to make consultation to the companies which have been in the business for a number of years.

AUTHOR: Elias Mhegera
URL: http://mhegeraelias.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: mhegeraelias [at] yahoo.com

I do not subscribe to the idea of adopting policies that overlook right and just aspirations of people, simply because such policies are not enforceable. Some workable remedy to Climate Change essentially should involve a popular understanding of the damage and its impact and thankfully MDGs are fundamentally directed towards that. Investments are a priority for eradication of poverty, hunger and illiteracy and not for casinos, resorts, 125 storey shopping malls – certainly not in India.

A case in point is Mandarmani Beach in West Bengal, in eastern India.

West Bengal is one of those lucky places on earth which can boast both the lofty heights of Himalayas and blue waters of Bay of Bengal. Well, only till recently. The state has a meager 650 Km of coastline of which nearly 500 Km is an estuarine delta, way too dynamic morphologically with one of the world’s largest upland sediment discharge. A stretch of about 50 or so Km from Digha (border of neighboring state of Orissa) to Junput (or arguably a place named Dadanpatrabar) is a tropical sandy beach with its appropriate ecology. See the portion marked with red in the picture below:

If we look closely, this stretch is situated between two estuarine systems, one that of the great Hugli river up north-east and the other smaller estuarine system of Subarnarekha river in Orissa down south-west. Even this small stetch of beach is punctuated by small tributaries like Somaibasan (which falls in Bay of Bengal just N-E of Digha) and Mandarmani which is further N-E. The whole beach is mesotidal having siliciclastic, quartzo-feldspathic material with well sorted medium to fine sand (Friedman and Sanders, 1978). The beach is geologically nascent (2760 to 3080 years old only). If you consider that a baby, we are looking at an infantile death because the whole Digha Junput beach is on the verge of destruction. And though experts believe that it is partly due to nature and partly human activity, I contend that human ignorance is guilty though not charged.

Digha had been a tourist revenue earner for 6 decades for the state of West Bengal. But beach business with its usual activities like wave surfing, beach sports and guided sea bathing or boating/diving as seen in the west were never developed for two reasons (a) cultural difference and (b) lack of proper planning. As far back as 1995, I attended a seminar where the consensus was that Digha beach was dying an inevitable death within 20 years. I would have been very happy to have proved wrong, but like all bad news it was proved true. Digha is now a polluted, over-populated, dirty and dead beach city bearing macabre signs of ignorance and lack of sincere intent to save it.

As Digha was dying, for two decades there had been occasional voices to save it. The engineering plans to save the backshore (mostly the hotels, pubs and flea markets) had been nothing short of disastrous (boulder pitching and concrete block pitching) which only resulted in adversely affecting the wave energy dissipation mechanics and attracted more erosion. There was a marked tendency by media to blame this disaster on progressively stronger tides and cyclones in last two decades with little consideration that the beach grew and existed for 3000 years with all natural forces and nothing was so much wrong until Digha’s emergence as a holiday destination by people from cities who would want air-conditioned suites to enjoy sea view from behind tinted glass windows. Hotels and Holiday Inns mushroomed with all pleasurable amenities but funnily no sewage treatment plants. The steadily narrowing beach would have tens of thousands of footfalls any given day so one could kiss goodbye to beach fauna like rare hermit crabs and red crabs. For construction of hotels, backshore sand dunes, which are an essential part of any beach system, were flattened along with screw pines that held the dunes against tidal surges for thousands of years. The old, traditional fish-drying activities of the local fishermen perished and gave way to touting for hotels and transport. And nobody really cared about the effect of sea level rise in the coastal area, which being low-lying (the average reduced levels of the beach is only about 2.5 m higher than MSL) was being threatened by an SLR at a rate of 2.4 mm/year (Baksi et al. 2001).

Digha gone, tourist attraction shifted to Mandarmani, which was a small fishing hamlet until a decade ago. The hoteliers moved in, this time cautiously but with no lesser aggressively than we saw in Digha. The infamous term ‘hotel’ was replaced with a friendlier ‘resort’ – suitable thatched umbrellas with split bamboo benches were thrown in to show of concern to nature but soon enough large scale construction started, again flattening the sand dunes and felling screw pines and some of the resorts these days boast swimming pools and conch shell shaped villas to attract the wealthier section of tourists.

Two things happened in Mandarmani that out-class Digha’s beach-urbanization.

(a) Complete flouting of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) stipulations under the Environmental Protection Act by Government of India by real estate interests. The Local Government’s blindness in this matter is almost criminal.

(b) Large Scale use of nearly 8 Km stretch of Mandarmani Beach by cars (Mandarmani is one rare motorable beach on account of high silt content possibly transported by longshore currents from the Hugli Estuary.

According to CRZ, no construction is permitted from Low Tide Line to 500 meters landward side from High Tide Line. In a recent trip to Mandarmani I personally checked that almost all resorts have flagrantly violated this regulation and carrying on merrily. Here is an interesting read where you can get more details.

Mandarmoni Report

In 1995, I trekked on foot from Digha to Mandarmani (approximately 12 Kms along the beach) to spend a night in a camp and sleep on a canvas folding cot to wake up and find myself to be the only biped surrounded by a live carpet of red crabs. 15 years later Madarmani greeted me with diesel smoke, shanty shops and sprawling resorts. The once desolate beach was now filled with 4 wheel drive cars, vendors, crowd and noise. It looked as though the sea is losing to cars.

Unlike the crabs that have fled, the village people have quickly adopted to the changing economy of Mandarmani. They now ferry tourists into the seas in what used to be their fishing boats. Some of them sell candies and ice-cream cones.

The beach shows obvious signs of littering and fast getting polluted.

New resorts are coming up each day and new shanty shops too.

The beach traffic mainly consist of 4-wheel drives that are used as pick up and drop down service by many resorts as these resorts are only accessible by driving approximately 6 Km over the beach.

The livelihood of local villagers, which traditionally remained either fishing or agriculture, have suitably adapted to the changes. I met Jaydeb Sasmal (pronounced sasmawl), a man of thirty from the locality named Dadanpatrabar, is from a family of farmers. Jaydeb now drives a vehicle, locally called van rickshaw, which is basically a motorized version of a tri-cycle. The vehicle is out-fitted with a Kirloskar Cummins 200 cc single stroke diesel engine which is a multipurpose machine in rural Bengal. This engine can be used as prime mover for irrigation pump, husking machine and even running small generators for electricity. With a little ingenious modification it can run on kerosene or a mixture of kerosene and diesel. Jaydeb’s vehicle cruises at a steady speed of 15 Kms per hour with generous emission of smoke and sound.

I was curious to know how much Jaydeb earns per day and whether he is aware about the environmental problems associated with it. Check the video below for an impromptu interview of Jaydeb.

When we are facing sacrifice of our wasteful life-style to put a check on CO2 emission, fancy lectures will not sell to the likes of Jaydeb, since he is seeing this growth as life changing opportunity. In India and China, creating Climate Change awareness and effective control will certainly not work with a top-down approach. It will need to come from grass-root level, with active participation and with innovative eco-friendly indigenous enterprise.

I missed the red crabs very much. Informed that they are still seen near the Mandarmani Estuary (locally called ‘Mohana’), I took the service of Javdeb’s wonder vehicle. To my relief, the red crabs were still there taking their last guard before a final retreat. I was confronted by 10 year old Khaibar from the adjacent village holding a live crab in his hand and asking me to buy it.

I persuaded him to let the crab go paying 10 bucks – double the price he was offering to sell it to me.

Mandarmani will not last long. That’s sad news. But Jaydeb and Khaibar will continue to grab the next chance of earning a livelihood and since it is a betterment of their lives from abject poverty, India, the would be super power, will have to do the double duty of pulling down the upper limit of affluence-and-waste and pulling up the lower limit of poverty-and-ignorance.

AUTHOR: Pabitra Mukhopadhyay
URL: http://pabitraspeaks.com
E-MAIL: mukhopadhyay.pabitra [at] gmail.com

According to the organizers, “After launching the Nepal tourism years 2011 campaign the country is spending so much of money and resources in bringing the tourist in this country where as the political parties and their affiliated organizations are constantly hampering the business by such intrusions. We the tourism industry and all the related organization have organized this rally to opposed such acts of shut downs. The Tourism industry has hugely been affected suffered the consequences of bandhas and shutdown and we don’t want to bear any more cost, that is the reason why we have come out and stepped up. No matter for what reason the political parties have organized the shutdown program it’s illogical and unpractical.”

AUTHOR: Shreedeep Rayamajhi
URL: http://www.shreedeeprayamajhi.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: weaker41 [at] gmail.com