The Forest Department will hand over the functioning of 75 of its rest houses, located across the state, to local panchayats, women self-help groups and yuvak mandals to create local livelihood and employment opportunities and offer accommodation to visitors in rural areas.<\/p>\n
The Forest Department will lease these rest houses to individuals or organisations belonging to local panchayats, where they are located so that employment opportunities can be created in rural areas. So far, women self-help groups are runnning 24 rest houses in places like Narkanda with the ownership and control remaining with the Forest Department.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe results of the 24 rest houses, which the Himachal Pradesh Ecotourism Society has leased, have been very encouraging. Besides the room tariff, the agencies<\/p>\n
running the rest houses will be allowed to charge additional Rs 350 for maintenance and offer paid food and laundry services,\u201d said<\/p>\n
K Thirumal, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Himachal Pradesh Ecotourism Society and Chief Conservator Forest (Eco-Tourism).<\/p>\n
Thirumal said that the department was making efforts to help persons running the rest houses undergo professional training at hotel management institutes as there was a lot of potential and interest among people in eco-tourism.<\/p>\n
The Forest Department has 459 rest houses in Himachal located in the most pristine locations in the most remote areas. However, some of them are in a very rundown condition and are in dire need of renovation and upkeep. To generate revenue and offer accommodation to visitors at places where there are no hotels, the department has made booking online for 149 of its rest houses, including 11 being offered through online travel agencies.<\/p>\n
Membership cards<\/p>\n
for \u2018free\u2019 stay<\/p>\n
The Forest Department has also decided to launch a scheme, offering membership cards to people for free stay at its 150 rest houses along with the use of 32 parks and 250 trekking routes. While a 20-year lifetime membership card for Rs 2 lakh is called Snow Leopard, the annual membership for Rs 10,000 will entitle a person to Rhododendron Card.<\/p>\n
The modalities of the scheme are being worked out as caps will have to be imposed on the number of days of stay. Under the scheme, only a card holder and his immediate family members, including spouse, children and parents, will be entitled to benefits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Forest Department will hand over the functioning of 75 of its rest houses, located across the state,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":901730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[28,377585,134],"class_list":["post-901729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jobs","tag-business","tag-himachal-pradesh-forest-rest-houses-ecotourism-livelihood","tag-jobs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}