PANAJI
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Thursday chaired the first meeting of the Goa Tourism Board and said that it aims to promote heritage and culture of the State.The meeting held at the State secretariat at Porvorim was also attended by Deputy Chief Minister Manohar (Babu) Ajgaonkar, who holds the tourism portfolio and by virtue of it is the Board's vice-chairman.
Sawant took to micro-blogging site to say that the Board aims to promote sustainable tourism and will work towards providing new avenues for tourism with a focus on promoting the State's culture and heritage.
According to Sawant, one of the primary tasks of the Board will be to work on reducing bureaucratic red tape and systemic bottlenecks coming in the way of expediting tourism-related projects in the State.
The Goa Tourism Board will be the administrative and policy decision-making nucleus for the tourism sector and will also be responsible for strategizing the promotion of Goa globally.
Setting up the Board was a major reform and is part of a new tourism policy which proposes an onslaught on narco-tourism, which a corrupt system has been grappling to deal with since tourism formally began accidentally via the 'hippie' culture nearly half a century ago.
The policy, however, is not the first Goa government has had and at least two such master plans in the past have remained largely on paper, despite the tourism sector having grown to be the single largest primary contributor to the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP).
