Sri Lanka woos Indian beauty queens, swamis to boost tourism

P K Balachandran
Faced with a steady fall in tourist arrivals due to the worsening security situation, Sri Lanka’s Tourist Board has roped in Indian beauty queens, holy men and intellectuals to tout the country as a safe and worthwhile destination for Indians, who have in recent years emerged as the largest group of tourists visiting Sri Lanka.

Parvathy Omanakuttan, Miss India World for this year, and Tanvi Vyas, Miss India Earth, are expected to set the ramp on fire at a fashion show in Colombo this weekend. And in August, three Hindu holy men from North India are to arrive with a retinue of 1,000 devotees of Lord Rama to visit 34 important sites on the island associated with the epic Ramayana.

“Those on the Ramayana trail will be Swami Ajayji of Triveni Seva Mission at Delhi; Swami Krishnanandji of the Rashtriya Go Raksha Samithi; and Swami Gyananandji Maharaj, an exponent of Krishna Katha,” said Ashok Kumar Kainth, a Tourist Board researcher on sites relating to the Ramayana in Sri Lanka.

The Indian intelligentsia is being tapped, too.

In July, a 20-member delegation of the New Delhi-based Antar Rashtriya Sahyog Parishad headed by veteran journalist Baleshwar Prasad and former Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, will tour Sri Lanka, meet its leaders across the board, and hopefully propagate the virtues of the island on return to India. “The aim is to get favourable publicity in India for Sri Lanka in the midst of all the negative publicity the world over because of the war and the bomb blasts,” said Director General of Tourism, S. Kalaiselvan.

“We want to promote this beautiful and culturally rich island as a destination for the young and trendy, as well as seniors, intellectuals, and those with a religious bent of mind,” he told this website’s newspaper here on Saturday.

The Tourist Board is worried about the fall in arrivals from almost every country, including India. Comparing the data for the period January-April 2007 with those for a similar period in 2008, there had been a 14.3 per cent fall in Indian arrivals. The number had come down from 37,964 to 32,547.

Most of the arrivals have been from South India. The Sri Lankan Tourist Board thinks it’s time it tapped the North Indian market, too. Hence the bid to get all India beauty queens, holy men, intellectuals and publicists from North India