A mission to turn Kumarakom, neighbouring villages into women-friendly destinations

Kottayam women entrepreneurs work to make Kumarakom a women-friendly tourist destination through training and infrastructure improvements.

At her office room attached to a single-storey house in Maravanthuruth, a village that abuts Vembanad Lake, Ambily M. Soman, who runs an ethnic kitchen and a women-only travel group, has been busy charting a schedule for the next couple of months. A few guests, mostly foreigners, are slated to visit her kitchen next month while she has also been flooded with inquiries on the travel packages on offer. In between, she is required to make it to the interiors of Kumarakom, a global village destination nearby, several times and interact with the rural womenfolk there.

The 43-year-old is one among the hundreds of women from the backwater landscape of Kottayam who work as tourism entrepreneurs. Over the next few months, she is going to be an active part of a mission by the State government to turn Kumarakom and its neighbouring villages into a women-friendly destination. The project will see the participation of women in a whole lot of activities, including catering and accommodation, transportation, and serving as community guides.

The programme, which seeks to provide a gender balance to each aspect of tourism in the region, aims at bringing in a batch of 500 women to tourism entrepreneurship in and around Kumarakom in the first phase. As part of it, a survey was taken out to identify the gap in women-friendly infrastructure, followed by a gender audit.

“Kumarakom, in fact, has been one of the select destinations in the State where women occupy over 50% of the space in the tourism industry. It currently hosts close to 100 tourism initiatives run by women. All we need to do is to plug a few gaps and, hopefully, we can complete this process by next year,” says K. Rupesh Kumar, coordinator, Responsible Tourism Mission.

Besides offering training to women entrepreneurs, local community orientation programmes will be carried out at the grassroots. Orientation programmes will also be held for different stakeholders such as auto-taxi drivers, homestays, and so on to ensure that the destination remains women-friendly.

Having conducted women-only trips to different parts of Kerala, Ms. Soman feels that the local community in Kumarakom, which found a place on the global tourism map at least a couple of decades ago, has been very sensitive and responsive to tourists.

“But women, especially those who are travelling solo, will still require a much higher level of security to feel safe in a destination. The installation of CCTV cameras and police alarms at different points, deployment of more pink police, certification of taxi drivers, and so on can go a long way in achieving it,’’ she says.