Dr Nirmal Kumar and a team of professors from Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi are on a mission to boost sustainable tourism in the hill states. Here's how they're doing it.
A group of professors from Delhi are on a mission to promote sustainable tourism and bring more livelihood options to the villages in Uttarakhand.
Dr Nirmal Kumar along with a team of professors from Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi, renovated four houses in the Khunt village of Almora and turned them into homestays. To boost sustainable tourism, they decided to preserve the traditional mountain life in the village, thereby letting the villagers earn a livelihood from it.
They used mud, bricks, and locally available materials to renovate the old houses and set up the homestays. The team also installed a rainwater harvesting system in the village.
Besides, they set up traditional patnala systems and served locally prepared food in traditional stone plates called Pataals.
The brains behind the architecture were Studio Bardo, an architecture and design consultancy firm based out of Almora Uttarakhand and founded by Nikita Verma and Kshitij Aggarwal. Graduates of SPA Delhi, they moved to the mountains to pursue their passion for sustainable design architecture.
These traditional houses exude an authentic feel and comfort to those visiting especially from the cities. These homestays now provide a stable income for the villagers.
Apart from homestays, as an effort to increase the earnings of the villagers, the team even conducted employment-oriented workshops like mushroom cultivation training.
After realising the positive impact they brought into the village, the team is now determined to develop more such homestays to empower the locals and promote sustainability.
Watch their inspiring story here:
Edited by Yoshita Rao
