Goa state government’s tourism department has lodged a police complaint against a businessman who threatened to defame the state tourism industry and asked others such misleading messages on X to post they have had a bad experience on a website.
The complaint was filed by Rajesh Kale, the Deputy Director of Tourism, who took the incident to the Superintendent of Police at Panaji Cyber Crime Station. The complaint, filed at 3:52 PM on November 5, reveals an act of ‘mischief in public’ that can pose a future threat to the tourism industry in Goa.
Kale claimed that the aforementioned entrepreneur released fake and negative statistics about Goa’s tourism industry through his social media account, which has approximately 22K followers. The businessman introduced himself as the founder of an online legal learning platform and posted allegations stating that foreign tourists were avoiding Goa and moving to other cheaper tourist destinations, such as Sri Lanka.
He also showed a chart with a report about the flow of tourists for the period 2019-2023, with a focus on Russian and British tourists, dividing the number of visits to Goa.
In his post, the businessman said that very soon, even the Indian tourists would stop visiting the state due to some miscreants reporting loud incidents of exploitation and skyrocketing prices in Goa, making a perfect way to look at a Goan tourist map huge signboards would be placed with the message ‘GOA NO MORE’. It also used data from the China Economic Information Center (CEIC), but as Kale pointed out, the information was not reliable or validated by the tourism sector.
Kale alerted the target in his complaint that such fake reports tore down the façade of a vibrant Goan tourism industry and created unwarranted panic among the traders and the people of Goa. He also said that such misinformation could be costly for the economy and a death knell to those who relied on the tourism business.
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