Sikkim Homestay | Charitable Trust | Samthar Farm House
Background information : After 15 years of experience in remote area tourism and interaction with village communities, General "Jimmy" Singh was convinced that the main issue exercising all minds is gainful employment amidst a growing population. The need of the times is to provide the young with ability to earn within the environments of rural society. To this end integrated village tourism offers a viable potential. However lack of funds and the inability to communicate in spoken English are the main hurdles depriving rural people from utilizing their assets – land, personality traits, local knowledge and skills towards gainful employment in tourism related activities. This line of thought lead to evolving this project Objective : |
Concept Awake and shine is an attempt to integrate the physical attributes of the Samthar Valley and its people, with income generation from village tourism. The concept is to interlock income generation with empowerment, development, vocational and health care micro sub projects to create the Samthar Himalayan Village Tourism model Based on the belief that the privileged must share with the deprived, the project was started in Feb 2007 with philanthropic funding. The General set out to establish that a lot can be achieved through modest resources available to one individual. The project seeks to be sustainable by generating earnings and employment from tourists by developing the Samthar village home stay tour circuit, and sale of village products. It also provides for empowering the future generations by teaching spoken English, enhancing earning skills, employability, and improving the quality of life. Project vision is to create model rural hamlets, by improving the quality of life by providing sources of income, improving vocational skills and provide quality schooling with focus on spoken English. Project design The project is designed to achieve results through Empowerment, and Development modules as explained below Empowerment Sub projects Create infrastructure for village tourism based on the home stay concept, with philanthropic assistance, to provide earnings from tourism.
Evolve and establish a rural Pre School model to empower children to be proficient in spoken English in order to build foundation for future employment in tourism. Develop this model into a primary school. To create earnings by enhancing existing skills and teaching new skills, through “on the job” training Development Sub projects to improve quality of life of the people Some essential development/ improvement sub projects visualized are:-
Health Care Take basic health care to the remotest hamlets. The project visualizes a well equipped poly-clinic manned by volunteer doctors located at Samthar, with Para- medics reaching out to the remoter villages, providing free consultancy and medicines to the needy. Status Report Click here for updated status report Conclusion Project Awake & shine is conceived as an integrated tourism project creating earnings for the local community, through value added tours. The scale is modest in scope but designed for maximum impact. It has made a good start, with earnings at start up. This has gained the confidence of the community. The Awake & Shine School, Women’s working group and Village tours have been a success. It is hoped that guests who come on the value added tours will interact with the people and become participants in the real sense. Some will donate their skills, some return as managers, and others will generate more donors through word to mouth publicity. |
Project Awake and Shine
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