MAPUSA
Tourism Minister Rohan Khuante on Friday told the Goa Legislative Assembly that anyone who has been operating hotels illegally will be fined up to Rs 1 lakh and their electricity and water connection will be disconnected.
Khaunte also said that over 300 hotels “ 188 in North Goa and 113 in South “ have been issued notices for not registering with the Tourism Department and the concerned departments have been directed to disconnect their water and power connection.
“One year has passed. We have given them enough time. If the hotel owners don’t want to be penalised then they should come under ease of doing business platform where they get legal sanctity and the government also earns revenue,” Khaunte said, while responding to Velim MLA Cruz Silva during the Question Hour.
The Velim MLA said that although tourism was booming in Goa, the government had failed to collect a large part of revenue due to hassles of unregistered entities operating various services in this sector.
The Tourism Minister said many guest houses and small hotels were hesitating to register because of huge paper work.
“Under the ease of doing business we brought down the requirement of 25 documents to just three documents “ ownership, GST registration and Aadhar or any other ID “ for registration of a unit. Once these documents are produced the tourism department provides NOC for operation of the hotel. However, they need to get licences from other departments like pollution control board, electricity, panchayat etc.,” he said.
He said with this move the Tourism Department registered a growth of 46 per cent in terms of renewals, 1077 per cent in terms of new registration and the C and D category hotels went up from 3,490 to 6,290 hotels.
He further said by collecting Rs 3000 as registering charges the department earned revenue of Rs 82 lakh.
Quoting the KPMG report, Silva said 43 percent of Goa’s tourism business activity remained unregistered.
He said the report showed that 59 percent of hotels remained unregistered and among A hotels 16 were not registered and 6,000 homestay flats were unregistered.
Khuante said that the KPMG report was a referral report and the figures about illegalities given by them were astronomical and hard to believe.
“The tourism department has issued notice to KPMG asking for the supporting documents for their report on tourism,” he said.
Fatorda MLA Vijai Sardesai said that although the tourism minister was emphasising on quality, several tourists could be seen cooking and sleeping by the roadsides.
Pointing out to revenue loss, he said in a gated community seven units belonging to one person were operating in seven different companies' names and wondered how the government would tackle the same.
The Tourism Minister informed that as much as there are laws there were shrewd people who were trying to find a loophole to evade paying taxes.
He said the biggest challenge was tracking the homestays and second homes and the record was not available with anyone except on Online Travel Agents (OTA) platforms.
He also said that the Tourism Department has introduced the TIME software which gets all the data from the hotels.
“We will be able to track the inflow of tourists, time spent by them in the State, their age group, nationality and other details,” he said.
