I CANNOT help but feel that the policy adopted by the Commission for India, regarding the issuing of visas, effectively discourages foreign journalists from travelling in the country. I intended to travel to India with a group of friends from late June till mid July. We are all journalists working in the local news media. We submitted our tourist visa applications, which were to be valid for one month, to the Indian Commission and each paid the requisite HK$40. When we went back to the commission to pick them up, we were told that our visas had been suspended, because we were journalists. It was explained to us that we could apply for a special visa which cost 10 times as much as a normal visa. The official at the commission could not explain the rationale behind this policy. Are the Indian authorities unwilling to let journalists into their country? Does India want to screen who it lets in and who it doesn't, because it does not want any negative accounts of the country to be given? I asked if the visas would have been given had we lied about our occupations? The official suggested that one solution would be for us to get an employer's letter which would state that while we were in India we would not be involved in any journalistic work. However, the next day, when we returned with these letters, a senior official from the commission, told us such a letter was of no help. One of my friends who had just resigned from a local media organisation was granted the ordinary visa. The rest of us had to pay an additional $360 to get the special visa. On our way home, I learned that the difference between the two sorts of visas is not only the fee, but also the immigration-check procedure. When we crossed the border from Nepal to India, those of us who held special visas for journalists were checked against a list of suspected criminals. FIONA SHEK New Territories