The recent tall claims of Minister for Tourism Manohar ‘Babu’ Ajgaonkar in the state legislative assembly as regards curtailing the expenses of his department on the tourism promotional activities by curbing the participation of the department in road shows has turned out to be false and misleading, going by the huge amount of Rs 20.10 crore spent on the foreign junkets of the department, related to the road shows and other events, as revealed to the House through a written reply.
This information, on the contrary, has revealed that after Ajgaonkar took over as the Minister for Tourism in March 2017, the expenditure on tourism-related road shows increased exorbitantly by way of inclusion of event management agencies, which replaced the officials of the department involved in such events.
The road shows of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) and the Ministry of Tourism (MoT) held in the USA and Canada, as well as the PATA road shows at Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Vienna, Prague and Warsaw, in which the Goa Tourism Development Corporation (GTDC) had participated in the year 2016, were without engaging the services of any event management agency by the Corporation.
In stark contrast, huge expenditure in multiple of crores has been borne by the department of tourism, towards the fees paid to such agencies, which have been recently empanelled to organise such road shows as well as create infrastructure for various tour and travel events.