PANAJI, Goa — He travels a great distance from the grim hinterlands of the nation to the state of Goa on the southwest coast to see her as though she were a monument. He walks behind her, saying several times, “Excuse me, a picture?” He wants a selfie with her. If she consents, there is much handshaking. Then he goes through the photos with a sudden serious expression.

Some days, as he lies on the beach with a beer bottle in hand and observes the foreign white woman, there is the animal melancholy in his eyes of watching something unattainable. And he says things about her body to her that he and his like-minded friends, of whom there are usually many, find hilarious.

In the tourism department they call him “the cheap domestic tourist.” Economically worthless because he spends so little, often living in buses and cars, he has begun to travel for leisure more often than a person of his means used to. The tourism industry regards him as an adversary of the high-value tourist, but he is much more — a mascot of the fact that India makes the simplest joys of street life difficult for women.

There was a time when the sheer hardships of India contributed to its charms as a tourist destination for the West. But the recent increase in reports of rapes in India has, more than the nation’s many other horrors, diminished its attraction. The government, however, refuses to see the heart of the problem.