Goa Agrees to Big Growth in Casinos

Goa, India's beach paradise, is set to become the country's gambling capital after local politicians said the state would allow 10 more floating casinos to operate off its shores.

The tiny former Portuguese colony is the only state in the country to allow casinos. However, local opposition in the last three decades has limited gambling to one floating casino and a clutch of five-star hotels with slot machines.

Driving the new policy is the rising numbers of tourists - the state's 1.3 million population becomes a minority in the peak season. Dilraj Kaur, a civil servant for the state's home ministry, said: "We are looking to catch some of these tourist dollars flowing into the state. Operators [of the new casinos] will have to get licences from a number of authorities but we expect that within a year they will start."

Gambling remains largely frowned on by Indian society, although the country has long had a horse-racing culture patronised by the wealthy. In recent years, hotel chains have lobbied to change the law, pointing out that tourists often go instead to Nepal and Sri Lanka, where gambling is permitted.

In many ways, Goa aims to replicate the success of another former tiny Portuguese enclave, Macau, which reinvented itself as the gambling capital of the South China Sea, attracting more than 4 million people a year.

There are also signs that Indian entrepreneurs are quietly eroding the law. Next year a gambling website set up by businessmen will host the country's first big poker tournament, in Goa.

However, not everybody agrees with the direction of the state's policy. Manohar Parrikar, the former chief minister of Goa, said there was an unseemly rush to award licences. "We do not have an effective mechanism to regulate casinos, yet the present administration is handing out licences. I have been told six have already been awarded.

"My concern is that we will simply be inviting criminal syndicates and money-laundering to set up in Goa. It is not the kind of tourism we should be promoting."