Monday, February 26, 2001		Article

Seeing India through the windscreen of
an automobile
Tribune News Service

"THE best way to see India is through the windscreen of an automobile or the visor of a helmet," says indiaoverland.com a travel site with a difference.

What sets indiaoverland.com apart from other travel portals is that the complete content is created through the extensive first hand travel experience of its team led by M. M. Rupani (Bob), who have collectively travelled several millions of kilometres, visited hundreds of destinations, however remote, and stayed in thousands of hotels and resorts.

The portal has royal patronage and in an unusual coming together of Marwar and Mewar, erstwhile rulers-turned hoteliers Maharaja Gaj Singhji II of Jodhpur and Shriji Arvind Singhji of Udaipur are both patrons of the site.

Bob Rupani, founder, managing director and editor-in-chief of the portal, in an interview, said: "I have been an overlander for 20 years and Suvir (a director of the company) and I have been travelling all over the country. India Overland was born in an automobile.

"In March 200, when Suvir and I were travelling in Rajasthan, it was he who suggested that both of us get together to create a portal and share with like-minded people first –hand information that had been collected over the years," the former editor of Car and Bike International said.

Associated with the portal are media personalities Anil Dharkar, who has penned the main article and other features for the portal, Rahul Singh and auto journalist H. Kishie.

"Our portal is a content-based portal. The Web is a vehicle of sharing this content with the world. We are using the dot.com as a vehicle. If there were no dot.com, we would have written a book. We have Mahindras as a major sponsor and we are also tapping onto hotels, travel agencies and the like.

We are planning to carry a GPS and chart out the route on a GPS and carry it on a CD so that someone can upload it directly onto his GPS. Of course, this is in the future," said Suvir when asked about the plans of the company.

Indiaoverland.com is an online travel guide and its goal is to promote overland travel and tourism in India. The portal will provide detailed and valuable information on several hundred destinations and link them with the routes that are practical, exciting as well as subject specific.
The portal also gives extremely useful details about accommodation, places of interest, and the best time to visit and also excursions for the destinations. Each route is highlighted in a high quality map and each stage with the route also has its won accurate schematic map. All routes and destinations feature visually appealing photographs with the highlight being the "Editors Experiences" section. Here the authors describe their actual experiences in places where many have not been before.