IN its global campaign to attract foreign tourists, the country's "Incredible India" adverts feature a young woman enjoying a morning yoga session on a secluded beach.

What it doesn't show is what tourists, especially women, are more likely to experience: the persistent ogling and heckling by scores of Indian men.

"At times, I find it hard travelling around as a woman in Delhi. I've been groped twice in public," said Amanda Burrell, 36, a documentary filmmaker vacationing in India. "I think Indian women have it much worse."

In recent weeks, a spate of well-publicised attacks against women and a new study identifying rape as the fastest-growing crime in the nation's capital are painting an unflattering picture of the stereotypical Indian male as misogynistic, predatory and starved for sex.

While more and more Indian women are moving into the high-tech workforce and occupying key government posts, some analysts say many appear to be losing the battle to overcome centuries-old cultural attitudes that devalue the role of women.

"Many of India's social values have not kept pace with the development of its modern cities," said Shaibal Gupta, a social analyst for the Asian Development Research Institute. "We are becoming more cosmopolitan and the social norms being challenged by both men and women in India are the growing pains of that process."

For many women in India, those growing pains can be terrifying. In an incident that rattled the country, dozens of young men taunted and groped two girls as they left a New Year's Eve party in Mumbai. An Indian newspaper photographer who was nearby called the police - and recorded the melee in a series of shocking images that ran in almost every major newspaper in the country, launching a flurry of editorials about the treatment of women.

Perhaps most surprising to Indians was that the attack happened in Mumbai, widely perceived as one of India's most modern and progressive cities.

Gupta said: "Most Indian men don't have opportunities for intimate contact with women until their mid-20s. For some of them, their only exposure to women in a sexual context has been in the virtual realms of Bollywood and internet porn sites, which often have negative messages about how women are to be treated."

There have also been several high-profile assaults recently against foreign women in India: a British freelance journalist was allegedly raped by the owner of a guesthouse where she was staying in northern India and a 28-year-old American tourist was groped by a Hindu priest while visiting a temple in Rajasthan.

The rise in the numbers of female tourists being targeted for sexual harassment and assault in India, especially in the tourist hotspots of Delhi and Goa, has led the British High Commission and several other Western embassies to issue travel warnings on the dangers women often face here.

In a recent "sting" by a local newspaper, a young Indian model in Western-style clothes walked around Delhi to determine which areas are unsafe for women. The results confirmed what most women here already know: Delhi has plenty of "no-go" zones. Among the venues Indian women dread the most are crowded public buses, where some men take advantage of the cramped quarters.

In India, groping a woman in public is called "Eve-teasing," a benign, almost playful epithet for a form of sexual harassment that women more often consider traumatic.

Barkha Singh, chief of the government's Delhi Commission for Women, said: "India is not that advanced when it comes to the way many men treat women That's beginning to change, but it's going to take a lot of time."

So much of India's predominantly Hindu culture is skewed in favour of boys and men, say some social experts. In India's deep-rooted system of dowry, a bride's family pays the groom for marrying her - the custom has been outlawed but the law is loosely enforced. There also is a widespread practice of sex-selective abortions in a country with a preference for sons.

There have been about 10 million "missing female births" in India over the past 20 years, according to a 2006 study by the medical journal, The Lancet. The knock-on effect is that men now far outnumber women, creating an unhealthy gender imbalance in society.

"It can be difficult being a girl here," said Lauren Olsen, 16, a student at an American school in Delhi.