The Tourism Department has a staff strength of 50 and will be headed by its newly appointed Director General Tulasi Prasad Gautam. It will start daily operations from Sunday, the Tourism Ministry said. Gautam had earlier served as an executive director at the National ID Management Centre under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The Tourism Department will ensure that the licences necessary to set up businesses like hotels and travel agencies are issued on time besides formulating policies on tax and other matters in view of the needs of investment, said Gautam.

“As the Tourism Ministry’s role is to formulate policy and programmes, the department’s role will be to provide services, products and infrastructure development, besides regulating the tourism industry.”

The department will basically work in the area of providing services and regulating four sectors—expedition, trekking, hotel and restaurant and adventure tourism. “We will also strengthen the capacity of all the tourism offices across the country.” There are seven tourism offices in Pokhara, Kakkarbhitta, Janakpur, Namche Bazaar, Birgunj, Bhairahawa and Nepalgunj.

On the infrastructure front, the department will oversee the Tourism Infrastructure Development Project, which is currently working as a separate division of the ministry.

Government officials said that hundreds of hotels and restaurants had been added in the country over the past few years, and that only few of them were registered at the Tourism Ministry and many of them were yet to come under the tax net. The department will also work to bring them into the tax system.

Another major objective of the Tourism Department is to create a single-window system for the issuance of licences and permits for new hospitality businesses. For example, an entrepreneur wishing to open a five-star hotel has to go through a complicated bureaucratic maze to obtain a licence. The tourism division issues the operating licences in the last phase.

The department’s predecessors date from the 1950s. In 1957, the government formed the Nepal Tourist Development Board. It was dissolved in 1968 and replaced by the Tourism Development Committee.

The government formulated the first tourism master plan in 1972. The Tourism Department was formed in 1973. In 1999, the government dissolved the department and replaced it with the Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) formed under the public private partnership (PPP) model.

“The government’s move to restructure the tourism division into a department in order to support and promote tourism activities more vividly is laudable,” said Hari Sarmah, chief executive officer of the Nepal Association of Tour and Travel Agents.

“However, strengthening the department should not paralyze the performance of the NTB as it has been formed to promote Nepal’s tourism with the private sector’s participation,” he added. “As the NTB is currently not able to carry out its duties efficiently, it should be revamped. But the department should not control the autonomy of the NTB.”      

Gautam said that the department had been dissolved 15 years ago to form the NTB and incorporate the private sector to jointly promote Nepal’s tourism, and its existing role would not be hampered. “The NTB will act as a tourism promotional body while the department will function as a regulatory body.”