Incredible India turns multi-lingual

NEW DELHI: Aiming at world audience, the website for 'Incredible India' campaign will soon provide tourist related information in 11 languages, including Chinese, Spanish and Arabic.

"Our website is going to be in 11 languages including Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, French and Spanish to make it helpful for foreign tourists," tourism secretary Parvez Dewan said at the Incredible India calender launch here. Besides, the tourism ministry website will also have new features like virtual tours and audio guides of prominent tourist places in the country.

"Eight cities including Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Jaipur, Ahmedabad have been covered by virtual tours and our aim is to cover at least one place of every state in two years in the virtual tour programme," Parvez said. Hoping for a growth in foreign and domestic tourists in the current year, he said, "We are expecting an increase of about 5 per cent in the foreign tourist arrivals this year while the number of domestic tourist is increasing by 18-19% every year."

The new calender, launched by the tourism secretary, has 24 pages with each month having two pages displaying pictures of tourist attraction of a state.The calender has also carried 12 pictures of the last year calender at the bottom of it.

"In this calender, we have 36 pictures of 35 states and UTs. The biggest state UP has two pictures," he said. The pictures have been arranged to match the popular festivals of the month.

Parvez siad, "We have tried to arrange them in such a way that photos are matching with the months. For example Golden Temple is shown in April as Baiskahi, popular festival of Punjab, is celebrated in the month."

January has a picture of Lakshadweep beach as people prefer to go to a beach during this time while second picture of the month is of Himachal which shows snow.The calender also has the list of gazetted and regional holidays. "People planning for their visits to certain states may like to know the local holidays there, so we have given details of holidays in the calender," Parvez said.