Tourism ministry's culinary institute to be inaugurated tomorrow

The Ministry of Tourism's ambitious culinary institute aimed at promoting Indian cuisine as a niche tourism product will be inaugurated tomorrow, an official statement said.

The Indian Culinary Institute (ICI), with its campuses in Noida and Tirupati, will offer diplomas as well as under graduate and post graduate degrees to research in culinary arts.

The institute will also have fully equipped kitchen labs, micro biology labs, cuisine theatres, training restaurants, fully equipped class rooms, library and a modern hostel with facilities for 400 students, the statement said.

The ICI campus in Noida will be formally launched by Minister of State for Tourism K J Alphons and Minister of State for Culture Mahesh Sharma, who will be the chief guest at the inauguration event.

The Noida campus is spread across five acres of land. With the total project cost of Rs 98 crore, the campus has an academic block, commercial area, hostels for boys and girls, guesthouse for visiting faculties and other amenities like water harvesting.

The statement by the tourism ministry said that the main objective of setting up of the ICI was to institutionalise a mechanism to support efforts intended to "preserve, document, promote and disseminate Indian cuisine, meet the sectoral requirement of specialists specific to the cuisine, as also of promoting it as a niche tourism product".

At present, there is a dearth of state-of-the-art training grounds in the country to groom top-of- the-line chefs of international standards, it said.

To fill this void, the Indian Culinary Institute would provide the appropriate training platform at par with the elite chef schools functioning in different parts of the developed world, the statement added.