Parliamentary Panel Recommends Setting up Women's Tourism Safety Task Force

By: WE staff | Wednesday, 26 March 2025

• A panel of Parliament recommends the formation of an 'Inter-Ministerial Women's Tourism Safety Task Force'
• To develop comprehensive safety standards for women tourists
• This will monitor the safety and emergency response systems

The parliamentary committee has laid the recommendation for the establishment of an Inter-Ministerial 'Women's Safety Tourism Task Force', which would spell out safety protocols, monitoring systems, and most importantly, emergency plans, especially for women tourists.

In its report to Parliament last Tuesday, the committee insisted that environmental sustainability must shift from being an "auxiliary consideration" to a "core principle" in tourism development. To institutionalize this, the committee recommends creating a 'National Sustainable Tourism Certification System' with clearly defined parameters for ecological impact, resource efficiency and community participation.

The report prepared was 'Demands for Grants (2025-26) of the Ministry of Tourism.' It was prepared and presented by the Department related parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture. In the report, the committee said, "seriously concerned" about the reduced allocation and negative recoveries under 'Safe Tourist Destinations for Women' initiative as this reversal goes against the socialist spirit of tourism development and would discourage women towards visiting destinations in India.

Report also suggested the constitution of an Inter-Ministerial Task Force, namely the Women's Tourism Safety Task Force, to comprise representatives of the Ministries of Tourism, Women & Child Development, Home Affairs, and state tourism departments towards developing safety protocols, monitoring mechanisms, and emergency response systems that are directed primarily to female tourists.

The minister of tourism should provide resources for technology-enabled safety devices, such as monitoring the transport movement using GPS, installing CCTV cameras on tourist hotspots, and providing a centralized app of tourism safety with real-time assistance and emergency response for tourists.

This underutilization has been reported as one of the major impediments in unlocking India's potential in tourism. While it accepted that the ministry itself attributed understanding performance to things such as administrative delays, procedural bottlenecks, and coordination challenges, it believed that these merely have to be a little touch more than excuses.

Some of the other things that were condemned by the report are the Swadesh Darshan scheme, which carries a BE of Rs 1,900 crore for 2025-26, underutilized in each of the previous years; it disbursed Rs 349.87 crore against an RE of Rs 818 crore in 2023-24 and Rs 133.91 crore in 2024-25 against the outlay of Rs 350 crore. Other major schemes, such as PRASHAD (Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Heritage Augmentation Drive) also showed such patterns in underutilization in provisioning, thereby ringing real alarm bells about project management and implementation capabilities.

In addition, the committee recommended setting up Regional Tourism Coordination Councils (RTCC) to bring together relevant states that share similar tourism characteristics at the quarterly meeting to identify and combat regional implementation challenges. The panel suggested developing tourism hubs along national highways promoting regional heritage, cuisine, and culture in the first year and focusing on 100 such highways to promote local art, food, and traditions.