KERALA'S NOVEL EXPERIMENTS CONTINUE UNDER RT

Responsible Tourism is not a mere hollow ‘fashion statement’ for Kerala Tourism but a core value which guides the initiatives to take tourism activities to the grass-roots level, ensuring livelihood to local communities while offering wonderful experiential tourism products to the visitors, showcasing the ‘life on the move’. The success stories of Kerala’s RT initiatives, impressively sustainable and reassuringly inclusive, are drawing the attention of the entire world. Here, we present the unique RT experiments of God’s Own Country for our readers

Kerala is making great strides as the Responsible Tourism (RT) capital of the world with a focussed action plan. Since the official launch of RT Mission in October 20, 2017, Kerala Tourism has been able to establish 17,008 individual/group units under various categories based on activities and professions such as cloth bag making, paper bag making, handicrafts, organic farming, artists, artisans, community tour leaders, farm stays, ethnic cuisine etc. Of this, 13,567 are led by women. Overall, 92,980 local community members are earning a decent income every month directly or indirectly. The registered units of RT Mission generated Rs. 25.50 crore till January 31, 2020; Rs. 4.51 crore (August 2017 to March 2018); Rs. 4.98 crore (April 2018 to March 2019) and Rs. 16.01 crore (April 2019 to January 2020).

“Our aim is to link a minimum of one lakh local community members with the tourist industry directly or indirectly in 2020-21. We are quite optimistic of achieving the target given the resounding success of RT Mission’s activities in the last couple of years. Till 2017, the number of RT units in the State was 197. Now, it has crossed 17,000 in just two years,” said K Rupeshkumar, State Coordinator, Kerala RT Mission.

According to him, the RT Mission is giving emphasis to activities under the three pillars of RT concept: economic responsibility, socio-cultural responsibility and environmental responsibility. “The activities of RT Mission have brought about a drastic change in Kerala’s tourism industry. It is playing the role of a facilitator linking community members at the grass-root level with tourism industry. We are systematically working to link local communities directly or indirectly with tourism sector through awareness creation and, trainings and capacity building programmes across the State,” he said.