With a huge number of employees in the tourism industry rendered unemployed amid the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, the Nepal Tourism Board is implementing a program to offer temporary employment to those who have lost their jobs. Launched in partnership with the United Nations Development Program, the program is offering  short-term job to lower-level workers in the tourism sector by engaging them in the sanitization and maintenance of tourism facilities, which include trekking routes and bridges along the trails.

On July 20, the tourism board started seeking proposals from local non-governmental organisations, cooperatives and community-based organisations with a view to having their participation in the programme, according to reports.

Dhananjay Regmi, the chief executive officer of the tourism board said, "We initially started the program early this year in just five locations. We're implementing this programme nationwide from the new 2021-22 fiscal year." Nepal's new fiscal year began on July 16. According to Regmi, the programme shall be carried out in all the rural municipalities of hilly and mountainous districts under a resource-sharing mechanism as well as in some rural municipalities of the southern plain districts. Nepal's tourism is among the sectors being hit hard by the coronavirus, and hotels and restaurants had cut jobs by 40 percent during the first wave of the epidemic in early 2020, as per reports.

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