New Delhi :
Travelers heading to India from Afghanistan for cheap, high-quality medical treatment has been the silver lining for SpiceJet, the Indian airline that suffered a loss of INR 1.24 billion ($20 million) in the April-June quarter.
SpiceJet’s data shows that about 1,000 Afghan medical tourists and their relatives fly every month from Kabul to New Delhi, earning the company about INR 156 million ($2.6 million) a year based on average ticket prices. SpiceJet said the route is “very positive” when asked about profitability, but would not give more details. SpiceJet is the only private Indian carrier with direct flights to war-torn Afghanistan
“Demand is quite high for Delhi-Kabul flights,” said Mehtab Singh, a manager at Welcome Travels in Lajpat Nagar. “We book 20-25 tickets to Kabul every day during peak season.” The number of Afghans seeking treatment this year is 32,000, 21 percent more than last year, and is likely to increase now that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi relaxed visa rules to deepen ties. India introduced medical visas for Afghans in 2005 and Modi eased the rules on July 1, potentially allowing Afghans to stay for two years at a time and exempting medical tourists from some police registration chores.
Afghan medical tourism is part of an industry expected to be worth $6 billion by 2018 with 400,000 arrivals. Though called tourism, medical tourism is not exactly the run of the mill tourism that most visit India for. The two-hour, 625-mile (1,005-kilometer) trip between Delhi and Kabul in Afghanistan has several risks. On July 3, the Taliban attacked the Kabul airport with rockets while a SpiceJet plane was parked there.
But Afghans still travel here because it is the best bet at getting quality healthcare at a reasonable price. “There are hospitals in Afghanistan, but the quality of medicine is the biggest issue,” says Sediq, who has brought his mother to Delhi for a knee-replacement surgery. “Getting Indian visas is easy. The alternative, Pakistan, is less secure and less friendly.” Sediq grew up watching Bollywood films like many Afghans and speaks Hindi. He paid $3,700 for the surgery, which would have cost $19,200 in Singapore and $34,000 in the U.S., according to Patients Beyond Borders. Besides, they often combine with visits to tourist spots in North India , which shares many cultural similarities with Afghanistan.
Sediq is a student in New Delhi and stays in the city’s unofficial “Little Afghanistan”, Lajpat Nagar. He hopes that flights between the countries continue, since another option for medical treatment, Pakistan, is considered unsafe due to the ongoing conflict between the Afghanistan section of the Taliban and the Pakistani armed forces.
“Once I was going home with my girlfriend at 2 a.m. in Delhi, and the cops gave me a lift. Can you imagine the same in Pakistan? There, they’d probably shoot me the moment they realize I’m an Afghan,” he said.
source: http://www.digitaljournal.com / Digital Journal / Home> Trave / by Sravanth Verma / August 21st, 2014
