Happy Birthday: 20 years of Help Tourism
Monday, August 15th, 2011
‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls…’Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore
On 15th of August, 1991 India celebrated its 44th Independence Day. That was the birthday of a new movement: A free thinking in tourism evolved in the Indian subcontinent with the establishment of Help Tourism at Siliguri.
With time Help Tourism became a community movement, which supported natural and cultural heritage conservation, rehabilitation of poachers and terrorists, bringing together people across international borders and above all an effort to establish peace and rural empowerment through tourism.
The movement was initiated in the Sikkim-North Bengal region, which later spread into the whole of East and Northeast India in the 1990s, and further it spread to Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
This Help Tourism movement in the late 90s was indexed under Ecotourism, which in the later half of the first decade of 2000 came to be called as Responsible Tourism movement. In these years, Help Tourism has been consulted in India’s Rural Tourism implementation by UNDP and in Bhutan for their National Ecotourism policy by WWF.
Recipients of several International Tourism awards and finding place in several International Travel Guides, we the members of the Help Tourism family, invite all of you to come and explore the possibilities of exchanging your resources with the numerous Help Tourism destinations.
