Tourism is the second job in half the towns we visit

Our drivers are on monthly salaries, not per-trip fees, so nobody is tempted to push you into a handicraft emporium for commission. We do not take shop commission at all — it is the single largest hidden cost in Indian tourism and we removed it in 2014. Guides are paid a day rate that does not fall in low season, when they need it most.

In tiger reserves we book the full permit quota for your vehicle, so it stays a party of four rather than six squeezed onto a bench. Our naturalists follow a no-crowding rule: if four jeeps are already at a sighting, we drive on. We have never sold an elephant ride, a captive-animal photograph or a dolphin encounter, and we will not start.

Every vehicle carries a 20-litre water dispenser and we give you a steel bottle at the airport; a two-week trip for two would otherwise get through about sixty plastic bottles. Village visits are booked and paid for in advance through the panchayat or a named household, at a rate we publish. Nobody’s kitchen is a free exhibit.

We route trains where they work — the overnight to Varanasi, the Kandy line — and we will tell you when an internal flight is genuinely the better call rather than selling four of them by habit. We do not arrange orphanage or school visits. And we cost carbon into every quote, funding cookstove and mangrove work in the Sundarbans through a fund we audit yearly.