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NRI Achievers sought out and spoke to Vijay Haulder, a Deputy Director with the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority, responsible for and in-charge of the Authority’s forays into the Indian Market. He has been spearheading this endeavour of attracting tourism from India into Mauritius for some decades now. “Like much of Mauritians you might have met so far, I am also of Indian origin. My forefathers came here to Mauritius in the year 1861, from Bengal in India. Talking about me, I have been involved in this field of Tourism right from the word go. It would say that it was in was 1974, 40 years ago, when my tourism career began. There was no tourism authority then. In 1978, I decided I needed to equip myseld properly for this, so I went to Delhi. There, I joined the College of Vocational studies and did a BA in tourism. I recall those pleasurable days in India’s capital city, I enjoyed my student life. I travelled quite a bit, and let me tell you, I was really enchanted by Jammu & Kashmir and came to Mauritius & I am walk to other ministry. It was good for me it’s good time & enjoys my student life. I was look on creative activities. “So before I took up my work at the Ministry of External Affairs & Tourism, it so happened that I had already put in a wee little bit more than 30 years into the profession of tourism. This partially was responsible for me achieving good status at the Ministry. Now that we have the tourism authority since 1996, it looks after the promotion of Mauritius as a tourist destination worldwide. And I am the Deputy Director with the MTPA who is responsible for and in-charge of our campaigns for the Indian Market. “Inward Tourism from India to Mauritius has been steadily on the increase. In the beginning, it used to be some 2000 – 2500 per year, then by 1996 it was touching upto 7,500 annually. Now, number of passengers travelling to Mauritius from India is more in the range of 90,000 per year, out of whom I would say some 60,000 are tourists. I am afraid we do not undertake much of activity, but we do advertise in India through some print, mainly magazines, and also online. Once not long ago, we got a coffee table book made, which we sent to some 700 important people, mostly related to golf. We did it as a golf promotion and we had them in Delhi, Mumbai and in Bangalore. But then the problem with coffee table books is that it can serve the purpose for only a targeted set of people, say 500 – 700. If we want to communicate instead to some 60 or 70 thousand people, it would not do. Moreover, our information we are sharing ought to be up-to-date. “Mauritius is also a preferred location for many Bollywood producers and that is also one aspect that promotes our island as a destination to Indian audiences. “Talking about myself, my family has four members: Me, my wife, our daughter and our son. My daughter is in the UK doing Actuarial Science; my son is in Australia doing Engineering.”

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