



Mint Explainer: How and why is the government promoting homestays in India?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MUMBAI : Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, India's Union minister for tourism and culture, on 15 December informed the Lok Sabha, through written replies, of the government's initiatives to promote homestays, especially in tribal areas. Mint explains what these policies are and why the government is keen on homestays.
The minister filed two written replies in the Lok Sabha on 15 December. In the first, he laid out policies to promote homestays that the government has recommended for states and Union territories. These come from Niti Aayog report, released earlier this year, called ‘Rethinking Homestays’.
In the second reply, he said the ministry had received 17 proposals from states and Union territories to develop homestays in tribal areas under a sub-scheme of Swadesh Darshan, a programme to promote domestic tourism under the Pradhan Mantri Janjatiya Unnat Gram Abhiyan or PM-JUGA. Currently, some states have their own policies to regulate and promote homestays or bed-and-breakfast accommodations. The NITI Aayog recommended that all states adopt some of the best practices among them, such as Goa’s policy of requiring only three documents to register a homestay and Chhattisgarh’s policy to classify homestays under functional categories, including urban, forest, and tribal.
Besides, the ministry has suggested that states tie up with online travel aggregators and travel influencers to promote homestays and create ‘homestay’ clusters in their tourist hotspots. In his reply, Shekhawat stated that he had approved five of the 17 tribal homestay proposals he had received, which are from Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Uttarakhand, and Ladakh. These proposals have been granted ₹17.52 crore,
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