In order to promote the domestic tourism, the Ministry of Tourism, on April 14, 2020, launched a webinar series—Dekho Apna Desh—in an effort to boost local and national economy. The tourism sector in India is highly affected as there are no movements either domestically or across borders due to COVID-19 lockdown. The initiative encourages people to travel and explore various wonderful facets of India and to get a deep insight into cultural heritage of the country including monuments, cuisine, arts, dance forms, natural landscapes, festivals, etc. The first webinar took up long history of Delhi, titled, City of Cities—Delhi’s Personal Diary. The session which was based on tourism awareness and social history, was attended by 5,546 people who registered for it.
The details regarding the programme are available on a website, where citizens of India can take a pledge that they would visit at least 15 tourist attractions in the country. An interesting detail regarding the programme, as per the tourism minister, was that the tourism ministry would fund the travel expenses of people as an incentive who visited 15 destinations in a year and submitted the related photos on the website of the ministry. This incentive aims to initiate a mass movement that leads to more and more people to visit domestic tourist destinations so as to develop local tourism and boost economy.
You can see the proceedings of the webinar on the official links of the Ministry’s social media handles, Incredibleindia on Instagram and Facebook.