A Green roadmap

Ministry of Tourism has come up with the first draft of a national strategy and roadmap for sustainable tourism.

Nisha Verma

Arvind Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, shared that the national strategy has been drafted by Joint Secretary, his team and other ministry officers. “It can be a starting point. We will share it with stakeholders and then we will take it forward and see how we can have this kind of mainstreaming of environment in our tourism policy.

The national strategy will include a certification scheme, capacity building and we are also thinking of a system of assessing the states and ranking them as we have done in many programmes like ‘Ease of Doing Business’.”

Singh revealed that they have already developed a sustainable tourism criteria, giving indicators for the accommodation sector and tour operators, where they will work with the Responsible Tourism Society of India (RTSOI) for implementation through a certification scheme, which is also there for some other processes. “With the RTSOI, we are promoting a traveller campaign and we will see responsible behaviour by travellers. Once the tourism sector opens up again after this lockdown, we’ll take this responsible traveller campaign further,” he shared.

He added that under the strategy, they will also help the states in marketing, setting up safety standards, and also in some cases work with the local government to develop the local destinations and products there. “In addition, the private sector and the community want to be roped in and all this has to be backed with a campaign for responsible travellers as we have done with the RTSOI.”

Saying that there is a special relationship between tourism and environment, Singh added, “Tourism plays a positive role and we all know that tourism can play a negative role also. Currently, our country is ranked very low on environment sustainability, while our rank in the overall world travel and tourism competitiveness is 34, under environment sustainability it is 128, which is a poor reflection on us. Most of our neighbouring countries do very well in this regard. There is no denying the fact that more needs to be done for sustainable tourism. There is a need to mainstream the theme of sustainability in our policies, both at the national and the state level.”

Talking about aviation, he shared that as far as airlines are concerned, it’s a very serious matter because the use of fuel-inefficient aircraft and old aircraft lead to high toxic emissions. “We will take up with MoCA and support industry talk with them, because they are the ones who regulate the airlines. As far as the state governments are concerned, most of the states like Sikkim, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, and Andaman have taken steps because sustainable tourism is their bread and butter,” Singh said.

He concluded, “Once this national strategy and roadmap is there, it will be a document in the public domain. We will encourage the states to frame policies, which are in line with this national strategy, so that sustainable tourism and eco-friendly tourism is encouraged in the states. Since all states are different, we will handhold and work with them once this national strategy is in place, by campaigns, capacity building, skill training and other soft skills that need to be developed in this case.”

Commerce & Revenue Secretary must release SEIS payments
Arvind Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism, has said that he has written to Commerce Secretary as well as Revenue Secretary to release 2019-20 SEIS payments on priority. “I also spoke to Principal Advisor in the Ministry of Finance for the same,” he added. Inbound tour operators in the country have been pleading the government to clear their SEIS dues for a long time.