State Tourism Minister Satpal Maharaj asked the tourism officials to add adventure tourism, Yoga and wellness tourism to the tourism circuit aside from creating new religious centres to ensure increased footfalls of the pilgrims/ tourists. “We must now go for opening new tourist sites.
They must be adequately publicised to make the people aware of them,” he said while presiding over a meeting of the tourism department and Uttarakhand tourism development board (UTDB) in Dehradun on Friday to give final touches to new tourism policy of the State.
“We must promote rural tourism and home stay so that the people visiting them get knowledge about the local culture and tradition. Besides, their footfalls would bring prosperity for the villagers and dissuade them from migrating to towns and cities in quest of better livelihood opportunities,” the Minister said.
“Uttarakhand being located close to Delhi, the people from the national capital and other states grappling with the insufferable summer heat come to the mountainous places dotting Uttarakhand to get relief for some days. If we are able to provide them with home stay and rural tourism facilities they would be tempted to come again and again and in this process, the locals would be benefited too,” Maharaj said.
He asked the officers to prepare tourism calendar featuring the religious festivals. “This would make the people aware of them. Besides, we must include kite festival and hot air balloon festival in the list to make people interested,” he said.
While spelling out the contours of the new tourism policy, he said that thrust would be laid on funicular and sky lift. “Besides, the local cuisine must be promoted so as to enable the tourists relish the state’s traditional delicacies. Traditional farming must be promoted too with emphasis on the local produce like jhangora, mandua and gahat which are highly nutritious. Once the people chance to taste them they would take such products home too. This would boost the income of the growers of such grains as the demand would increase. As they would earn good money they would be disinclined to desert farming in despair,” the minister said.
He further laid thrust on motivating the local hotels and eateries to serve the traditional cuisine of the state to the tourists. “The new tourism policy would include tourist circuit, designation and track route as well. As we are stressing on ease of doing business and single window system the investors from outside would be interested to establish hotels in the state to cater to the tourist/pilgrim rush,” Maharaj said.