The major risks to your health from the armies of mosquitoes are malaria, encephalitis, kala azar and dengue. Cover your arms and legs; be liberal with the repellent and in problem areas sleep under a mosquito net. Traveller’s diarrhoea is another running problem and year after year traveller after traveller gets the ‘loosies’. Ensure it’s nothing nastier by avoiding green salads, uncooked food, and water that you haven’t sanitised by dropping an iodine pill into.

Slightly more serious is the risk of contacting AIDS, Hepatitis B and other sexually transmitted diseases. For your sake and the sake of others, always use a condom. Have safe responsible sex.

For climbers and mountaineers: look out for symptoms of altitude sickness/acute mountain sickness. If you ascend above 3500meters too fast you might feel nauseous, sleepless, and your head may ache. In this case your body is telling you that you’re having acclimatisation problems so let’s descend, buddy. Jokes aside, this is a very serious situation to be in and the only thing to do is to descend. Also carry sunscreen with minimum SPF 20 to escape sunburn.

The quality of health services is not consistent. Urban centres, particularly Kolkata, has good hospitals, 24-hour chemists, highly competent doctors and top of the line medical services. Conversely, rural and semi-rural areas have very limited facilities. Stick to the larger cities if you are anticipating trouble. Medicines are fairly cheap in India. Though chemist shops in the cities are well stocked, it is always a good idea to take along prescription drugs.

Travellers from yellow fever areas are required to have an inoculation certificate. Prior immunisation for poliomyelitis is recommended.

Cases of mugging, theft and worse aren’t completely unheard of but by and large serious crimes against travellers are few and far between.

Basic precautions:

• Keep your money and travel documents close to your body (perhapsin a pouch slung around your neck, tucked out of sight under your shirt),
• Keep several photocopies of your passport, insurance, travellers’ cheques etc. scattered through your luggage, Do not use a waist pouch, it may as well be a transparent plastic bag: it’s that fragile and that obvious!
• Do not put all your money in one place,
• Be extremely alert in the dark. The multitudes who are around in the day, disappear into their homes at night, and you go from having a huge thick safety quilt to a flimsy sheet! Try your best to be in a familiar area when it gets dark. If you are not, at least know how you can get to that area from wherever it is that you happen to be.
• Many women travellers wear the long tunic and loose pyjama dress of Indian women called the salwar-kameez and find that it substantially dissuades unwanted male attention.
• If you are travelling alone, do not advertise it.
• If you lose your passport, lodge a First Information Report at the local police station and contact your embassy.

Weights and Measures

India uses the metric system where 100cm=1meter; 1000meters=1km, liquids are measured in litres and solids in kilograms.

Electricity

220volts / 50 hertz is the frequency at which electricity is available WHEN it is! Power cuts and ‘load shedding’ is a regular feature. Another reason for visiting in the colder months would be that not only do power cuts become fewer but you’ll also feel the pain of them less! If your electric razor has flat-pin plug then carry a combination plug that will feed into a round-pin socket: across the sub continent plug point sockets are round rather than flat.

Customs & Duties

If you are above 17 years you may import the following in without attracting duty;
200 cigarettes or 50 cigars or 250 grams of tobacco, a litre of alcoholic drink, 250 ml perfume, gifts up to a value of Rupees 750 (foreign passport holders), gifts up to a value of Rupees 6000 (Indian passport holders) and articles of personal use.
It is illegal to bring in drugs, gold and silver bullion and coins that have gone out of use.

Post & Communications

Postal services in Kolkata are quite efficient; smaller towns have postal services that may have certain lacunae, like they may not have a speed post facility etc. Letters overseas must be marked "Air Mail" or "Par Avion". It takes a week to 10 days for letters to reach the U.K. and the U.S. from Kolkata. Have letters for you (surname first) addressed to the GPO (General Post Office) of the city, ‘Poste Restante’. The post offices hold letters for 30 days, and you’ll have to show them your passport for identification. There are post office branches all over the state.

Parcels are a bit tedious to send or receive and often when they do finally arrive, they’ve been tampered with. Courier services are widely available in the cities and small towns.

"Cyber cafes" are an increasingly common fixture in West Bengal’s urban landscape. At a fixed rate that varies from locality-to-locality, you can check your mail and surf the net. Very often the Internet business is an extension of what used to be a just a "PCO" that is a Public Call Offices. They are mostly little kiosks with the cryptic letters "PCO-STD-ISD" (..... huh?) - Subscriber’s Trunk Dialling and International Subscriber’s Dialling. Most offer fax services, and more and more now, Internet facilities too.


Tipping

It is customary to tip 10% of the bill at restaurants, but you may tip less if service charges have been included in the bill. At hotels tip 10 bucks to the bellhop, the same to the doorman ‘Durban’; if the service is particularly good, substantially more to the concierge and housekeeping.

Black and yellow cab drivers do not expect to be tipped. The opposite is true if you have a hired a cab for a long period.
You’ll find some of the most friendly and colourful service at tiny nondescript roadside stalls called ‘dhabas’. A small tip,even if it is only loose change, will be appreciated tremendously. Coolies (porters) at railway platforms have to be paid; negotiate the payment before you hire one.

English Language Media

No matter where you are in West Bengal it is never going to be difficult to find an English language newspaper. There are two major weekly news magazines and both are easily available at kiosks all over. Major Indian dailies have a Kolkata edition. The Statesman and The Telegraph are two well read English newspaper publications. They will be readily available even in a small Bengali village because the Bengalis like to keep abreast of all the events occurring in the world.

Cable TV has reaped a rich harvest. The skyline blooms with electronic blossoms of dish antennas in every nook and cranny of the state. BBC World Service and CNN beam the latest news; ESPN and Star Sports keep you up to date with how your club is (or is not) thrashing its rivals in UEFA; and Star (elsewhere known as Sky) beams an entire stable of entertainment channels.

The more widely accessible national channel too has some English programmes, and a daily English news segment. FM in the metros means Music like in the rest of the world. BBC World Service and Voice of America are on the MHz bandwidth but the frequency is variable.