Kerala Tourism Gets Serious About Eco-Friendly Norms

Susan George - Chennai

While it has become fashionable to spout eco-friendly jargon and declare one's commercial enterprise environmentally sound, Kerala Tourism wants the hospitality and tourism industries to translate words in to action. The Eco-Certification Scheme (ECS) for hotels and resorts in the state is slated to ensure that the very basis of Kerala tourism - the natural environment - is preserved and protected.

The scheme refers to a set of practices for each sub-sector within the tourism industry to become more eco-friendly - as part of the Kerala Tourism Eco-Initiative, Eco-Kerala.

The first part of this scheme aims targets the hospitality sector and involves grading hotels, resorts etc., as diamond member, club member and member of Eco-Kerala, based on their compliance to certain prescribed conditions. The period of membership will be two years, after which the members need to apply again.

Some of the essential conditions to be fulfiled include:

• Use of eco-friendly cloth, jute, paper bags or bags of biodegradable material in place of plastic-bags.
• Maintenance of local plants, medicinal or herbal garden in the hotel premises and its proper documentation with provision for providing information to guests.
• Display of water conservation messages in rooms and other important places.
• Purchase of local farm products like vegetables, poultry, fish etc. produced through ecologically sound practices like use of organic manure.
• Controlling 50 per cent of street, walkway, garden and external lights by time-devices.
• Ensuring that 50 per cent of the total lamps are CFL.

The member hotels will get 15 per cent subsidy subject to a ceiling of Rs five lakh on investment in pollution control facilities and equipment such as solid/liquid waste management, equipment for recycling of waste water, sanitation facilities and/or captive power generation facilities.