Spurred by plaints, vicinity of 22 tourist destinations in state to get a daily clean

“While many of these monument and temple areas are usually maintained by temple trusts or by the ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) in case of protected heritage monuments, we will however look at the cleanliness outside the premises of the structures. This includes approach roads to the monuments and temples, parking areas, market areas located outside. This move was spurred by a huge number of written complaints that we received on improving cleanliness in such tourist spots,” said N Srivastava (IFS), Commissioner of Tourism & MD of Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited(TCGL) an arm of state tourism department.

Out of total 22 locations, the cleaning work already started from April -2016 at 15 locations while for the remaining 7 locations the tendering procedure has been completed and work will start from June-2016,” added Srivastava.

Cleaning the surroundings of 22 tourist destinations will begin this year and more maybe added later on, say officials. “We have divided Gujarat into five zones and have initially picked up 22 tourist destinations across all the regions except Saurashtra for now and allocated Rs 10 crores for this. We began the exercise on April 4th and machines will be used to clean the roads several times a day on a daily basis and the department has outsourced the work to a cleaning agency,” added said MD Srivastava.

Among the 22 tourist destinations included in the list are Dwarka, Bet Dwarka, Junagadh district, Chorwad district, Madhavpur (Porbandar), Somnath, Chotila (Surendranagar) in Saurashtra, while in the Kutch zone – the list includes Mata no Madh, Mandvi, Koteshwar, Narayan Sarovar and Dholavira.

The north Gujarat zone which comprises of Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar includes tourist-heavy destinations like Ambaji (Banaskantha), Modhera (Mehsana), Siddhpur (Patan), Shamlaji (Aravalli), Adalaj ni Vav (Gandhinagar) and Sarkhej Roza(Ahmedabad). Among the list of tourist spots in Central and East Gujarat include Dakor and Galteshwar (in Kheda), Kaleshri (Mahisagar) and Shukaltirth (Bharuch) and Saputara (Dang) in the South Gujarat zone.