Tourists as house guests

TOURISM: The international bread and breakfast formula gets a cold start in India.

For most tourists, India's culture is limited to its destinations and monuments. The "people" part in the cultural interaction has been missing, at most places. But given a chance, some tourists would love to stay in a local's house, interact with the family, eat with them, and learn about their ways of life.

That's provided the room given is neat and clean and the family involved is sure they can handle an outsider in their house. To that end, the ministry of tourism recently launched 'Incredible India Bed and Breakfast (B&B) Establishments'.

The brochure itself says "the basic idea is to provide a clean and affordable place for foreigners and domestic tourists alike, including an opportunity for foreign tourists to stay with an Indian family to experience Indian customs and traditions and relish authentic Indian cuisine."

The idea, feel tour operators, will work wonderfully. Sunirmol Ghosh, managing director, Indo Asia Tours, calls the bread and breakfast scheme the need of the hour.

"A huge chunk of accommodation in London is bread and breakfast, where the guest stays with a family. Likewise, foreigners would love to stay with an Indian family. It will be a great experience for them," says Ghosh.

To make it popular, however, Ghosh suggests a room data bank through which people can easily book online. "One should also be able to access these rooms at airport and railway station outlets. It can be a part of an itinerary and the pricing should be different for these rooms ($30-50 at the most)," suggests Ghosh.

The potential apart, it seems like there are some question marks on the whole scheme, for now. It has been almost three months since the scheme was launched, and according to ministry sources, they have only received 20 applications as yet, half of which are incomplete (invalid forms).

More recently, four applications have been cleared and five more have been inspected. On average, each owner is ready to offer two rooms.

According to India's tourism minister, Ambika Soni, a total of 30,000 hotel rooms would be required in the National Capital Region of Delhi to accommodate tourists and visitors to the Commonwealth Games 2010. Bread and breakfast rooms will help fill the gap.

But for such rooms to be registered under the scheme, owners have to cross a number of hurdles. The first is to get police verification done for the rooms, which, knowing Indian conditions, is an ominous task in itself.

NDMC, MCD and the luxury tax office have deemed these bread and breakfast rooms as commercial. This means owners will have to pay commercial rates for electricity, water and pay luxury tax as well. Owners are not too sure about the marketing process either.

The good news though is that the government is keen to promote this scheme. It seems the shortage of rooms to the run-up of the 2010 Commonwealth Games has finally started to ruffle a few government feathers. Time to clear the doubts.