Business Standard

Tourism ministry launches online programme for tourist facilitators: Govt

The Ministry of Tourism has launched an online certificate programme with the objective of creating a pool of well-trained and professional tourist facilitators across the country

Tourists enjoy in the snow at Gulmarg near Srinagar

Tourists enjoy in the snow at Gulmarg near Srinagar

Press Trust of India New Delhi

The Ministry of Tourism has launched an online certificate programme with the objective of creating a pool of well-trained and professional tourist facilitators across the country, Rajya Sabha was informed on Tuesday.

The Indian Institute of Tourism and Travel Management (IITTM), which is an autonomous institute of the ministry, is the implementing agency for the programme called Incredible India Tourist Facilitator/ Incredible India Tourist Guide (IITF/IITG), which is a digital initiative, Tourism minister G. Kishan Reddy said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.

"The programme was operationalised on 01.01.2020. The system will provide basic, advanced (IITF-Heritage and Adventure), spoken language and refresher courses for candidates. Inputs are being received by IITTM from the leading universities for developing the course content. The candidates can pursue these online courses from anywhere and at any time and at their own pace," he said.

 

The online courses can be accessed from different digital devices. On successful completion of the course, an individual will be a professionally certified tourist facilitator who will support tourists by disseminating information, eliciting interest in them about the country and providing experiential tourism, he added.

Further, the Ministry of Tourism is conducting (offline) six week language courses i.e. Dutch, German, French, Japanese, Chinese to train Linguistic Tourist Facilitators (LTF) for tourism service providers under its suo-motu-initiatives under the scheme of 'Capacity Building for Service Providers' (CBSP), the minister said.

The basic objective of this Linguistic Tourist Facilitators is to create trained manpower in different foreign languages to facilitate the tourist visiting India from different countries and to upgrade the skill of the existing service providers to deal effectively with foreign tourists in their own languages.

The Ministry of Tourism has issued indicative guidelines for the state government and the union territory administration to issue guide licenses at the local level, he added.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Don't miss the most important news and views of the day. Get them on our Telegram channel

First Published: Aug 10 2021 | 11:12 PM IST

Explore News