KOCHI: The tourism development of Kalady stands short-circuited, at least for the time being! The state Tourism Department has asked the Ernakulam District Tourism Promotion Council (DTPC) to restructure the indigenous tourism project formulated for Kalady - Spice Tourism Circuit - as the deadline for implementing the project has expired. The decision was taken at a meeting held in Thiruvananthapuram to review the rural tourism projects in the state.The Kalady-Theni route was identified for the project after a survey as Kalady is famous for its nutmeg and turmeric cultivation. Launched in 2006, the project aims to facilitate capacity-building, thereby enabling low-income population to create and articulate their skills from within. It would further focus on women, unemployed youth and disadvantaged groups, minimizing negative impact of tourism and conservation and socio-economic development of the region. The project is divided into two - hardware programme and software programme. The Centre has provided the hardware fund of `50 lakh under the Rural Tourism Scheme and the United Nations Development Programme has supported it with `20 lakh for software activities under the Endogenous Tourism project. The Kalady Area Development Authority (KADA) was the agency to implement the particular project. “The software component of the project has been completed, while there was an unexpected delay in hardware component. The software component includes training programme for rural people such as personality development, making them capable of receiving and hosting foreigners who reach the village. The hardware component includes construction of a tourist information centre and development of better infrastructure. Of this, the Tourist Information Centre could not be constructed due to non-availability of land. Now, the collector is learnt to have given instructions to identify land for the tourist information centre,” said Jayasankar, secretary, DTPC. However, those associated with KADA said the agency was ignored in the implementation of the project. “KADA was entrusted only with implementation of software component while we were totally ignored in the implementation of hardware component. We have fully utilised the funds allotted for software component. An amount of `4 lakh is still pending for KADA. The reason for delay in implementing the hardware component is not known to KADA,” said Balakrishnan Elayidam, secretary of KADA.
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