I am just back from spending a week working with the ICRT India Foundation in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Bhopal. It was an honour to be at the ICRT India and the Subcontinent Responsible Tourism Awards presentation at BLTM in Delhi. Shri Satpal Maharaj, the Uttarakhand Minister of Tourism and Ms Mugdha Sinha, IAS, Director of General Tourism, in the national ministry, presented the Awards. The citations for all six categories in this year’s Awards are here.
This year, there is a Making Travel Inclusive category in the family of Responsible Tourism Awards. The Global Award winners, chosen by an international panel of judges, will be announced on November 4th at a ceremony in London.
The Madhya Pradesh Tourism Board and the Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation based in Maharashtra were recognised in the Making Travel Inclusive category in the India Awards.
Gold – Madhya Pradesh Tourism Board
Madhya Pradesh’s Responsible Tourism Mission (RTM) has supported the advancement of inclusive travel by implementing initiatives to ensure that all travellers feel at home in Madhya Pradesh. Through awareness programs, training sessions and employment opportunities, “RTM ensures that women feel empowered to travel independently and participate in tourism activities without any sense of fear.”
Through Project Humsafar, the RTM addresses the accessibility needs of differently-abled individuals at tourist destinations. By conducting accessibility audits and implementing infrastructural changes, RTM ensures that all travellers, regardless of their physical abilities, can enjoy the state’s tourist attractions. The Responsible Tourism Mission “aims to create opportunities for everyone to participate in and benefit from the tourism sector, thereby promoting social equity and empowerment.”
Silver – Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation
Through adaptive adventure and sports activities, they provide “opportunities for people, with and without disability, to come together and experience the adrenaline and camaraderie that only sport has to offer.” They aim “to provide more visibility for people with disability, promoting an environment of openness, sensitivity and empathy.” They report the differently abled having increased self-confidence and self-esteem, greater acceptance of “self-with-disability”, shifts in the public mindset about what the differently abled can do and better access for this marginalised group.
Previous winner – Lemon Tree Hotels
Lemon Tree Hotels won Gold and Overall Winner in the 2016 World Responsible Tourism Awards and since then continues to inspire others to adopt more inclusive employment practices. As I wrote back in 2016 explaining why they had been singled out for the overall global award:
“The reason that Lemon Tree Hotels are standing out as leaders in responsible employment is because they have wholly committed to barrier free employment. This means they are ensuring that people employed throughout the organisation, front of house and behind the scenes, are from groups of people who, in India, are often otherwise marginalised. This is a tricky issue in India where social security does not support people with disabilities or those from deprived backgrounds. And so Lemon Tree Hotels believes that it has a responsibility to ensure that people with physical, mental, emotional and indeed financial needs are introduced into mainstream employment and well supported throughout. In other words, removing the barriers that previously prevented many people from working in tourism. In so doing, the company believes it is contributing to fair and sustainable “nation building”; something many more nations could think about when it comes to hotel employment.
In India, barrier free employment doesn’t just refer to people with access needs, but also to those known as ‘Opportunity Deprived Indians’ such as women who have been physically abused, widowed or people living below the poverty line. Lemon Tree Hotels’ fair employment record also stretches way beyond any sense of tokenistic box ticking, with 13 percent of employees having a disability or special need and nearly 500 employees coming from marginalised sections of society, which is a super impressive 25 percent of staff. “
Lemon Tree Hotels have a clear social commitment to inclusivity. The have focused their “efforts on creating a socially inclusive work environment which seeks to bring in people of different backgrounds, abilities and ethnicities and offer them work as a unified team with a common goal.” They have “hired and trained over 3,000 people from the most marginalized sections of Indian society including disability i.e. Speech & Hearing Impaired, Physical Disability, Down Syndrome, Slow Learner, Intellectual & Developmental Disability, Autism, Acid Survivor as well as orphans/abandoned girls, school dropouts and transgender.”
Staying overnight at the Lemon Tree at Delhi Airport, I met many of the differently abled staff and was able to follow my own advice from 2016: “if you are staying at Lemon Tree Hotels, and your waiter, receptionist or any member of staff hands you a piece of card that makes you aware of his or her own needs or constraints, while also offering ways in which they can help you, then please smile and know that you are also playing a very important role in this fresh, fair and totally pragmatic approach to responsible employment.”
I enjoyed meeting and engaging with them.
