TravTalk India Online Magazine
More than 2,300 tourism and hospitality students and academicians from 77 universities around the country have been registered with the training programme by Voice of India Tourism (VOIT), a CSR initiative that aims to educate and enlighten young minds of the industry through daily live learning sessions.
Manas Dwivedi
Industry leaders from different sectors and fields are sharing their experience on video calls, which is complementary and free of cost for students. Lucknow University is the partner for the online virtual training programme for students, which will act as summer internship for them. The month-long programme offered via live Zoom calls and through a closed Facebook group, Travel & Hospitality Skill Development by VOIT, was inaugurated by Prahlad Singh Patel, Minister of State (I/C) for Tourism & Culture, Government of India, on June 10. The programme will conclude on July 11.
Sharing more details, Vishal Yadav, Managing Director, IDMS Group and who, as the founding member of VOIT, conceptualised the whole programme, says that the primary objective is holistic development of the knowledge of students through comprehensive training and education. All students, after the successful completion of the internship programme and certain tasks given as projects during the training, will also receive a certificate of a six-week industry training, which will be useful for them professionally. Besides Yadav, the team behind the initiative, working to make coordination smooth, includes Dharmendra Kumar, Managing Director, Geanis World, who is also an alumni of Lucknow University and played a key role in connecting all the necessary links; and Sunil Mishra, Managing Director, Cosmos Global. Dr Anupama Srivastava, Coordinator, Institute of Tourism Studies, Lucknow University, is also part of the core team. More than 35 travel agencies and companies are supporting it.
Yadav says that the initiative has received support and participation from students across the country. “From Kashmir to Thiruvananthapuram and from Gujarat to the northeast states, we have students from all regions. From Jammu & Kashmir and Leh-Ladakh, we have around 170 students, and 75 students from a hospitality college in Puducherry. Similarly, we also have students from Bihar, Vizag, Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh,” he shares.
Over 1,700 students attended the inaugural session which was presided over by Alok Kumar Rai, Vice Chancellor, University of Lucknow, while SP Bansal, Vice Chancellor, Himachal Pradesh Technical University and President, Indian Hospitality of Tourism Congress, was the special guest. EM Najeeb, Senior Vice President, IATO and Rajesh Mudgill, Honorary Secretary, IATO, also graced the occasion with their presence. Having realised that not everyone could access live Zoom calls or even good internet connectivity, the VOIT sessions have been linked to Facebook and made accessible to a closed group, so that students can replay the sessions at their convenience. Till now, VOIT has organised sessions on domestic tourism; hospitality & hotel operations; rural, sustainable and slow tourism; experiential tourism; Buddhist tourism; photography tours; tourism post-COVID; luxury trains as well as culinary tours.
Yadav adds, “So far, we have had a good journey with a number of prominent industry leaders and tourism stakeholders from different sectors of the industry joining us and sharing their knowledge and experience of working in the industry, which in turn acts as the best form of guidance for nurturing young minds. The response and feedback from students and academicians has also been encouraging.”
