Jammu to host winter sports soon: Nasir

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To ensure round-the-year tourism activities in J&K and promote water sports, Minister of State for Tourism, Housing and Urban Development, PHE and Revenue, Mr. Nasir Aslam Wani(Sogami)has said that Jammu would soon host National River Rafting Championship on Chenab River at Akhnoor.

The Minister said this in an interview “Seedhi Baat”to a private electronic channel Take-I.

He said that all the three regions of J&K have great potential in adventure tourism and a comprehensive policy is being worked out to boost the discipline like rafting, rock climbing mountaineering etc across the State. He said that a lot of work has already been done on this front and more activities are in the pipeline to make adventure tourism a fulltime tourism activity.

Referring the participation of J&K in World Trade Mart at London last week, Mr. Nasir said that the delegation led by Chief Minister, Mr. Omar Abdullah gave excellent presentation about J&K tourism potential and invited global tourists to visit the State to witness its scenic and beautiful tourist spots.He said new locations being developed from tourism point of view. He said the Government has taken several major initiatives to tap the vast tourism potential of the State by strengthening Tourism Development Authorities and Tourist Circuit. Giving details of the tourism potential of Jammu province, Mr Nasir said that Jammu province has witnessed a major increase in the pilgrim tourism with a heavy rush of pilgrims visiting Mata Vaishno Devi and Shiv-Khori, adding that a policy is being formulated to divert them to other scenic spots of Jammu, erstwhile Doda, Rajouri, Poonch, Reasi for which tourism infrastructure was created under Prime Minister’s Reconstruction Programme. He said various villages have already been identified for developing them as tourist villages for which Rs.70 lakh would be spent on each village. On unplanned construction of colonies in urban areas of the State, the Minister said that from now on every construction would be taken up as per the Master Plan. To ease the frequent traffic jams in twin capitals of the State, the Minister said that a foolproof mechanism would be adopted to tackle this problem.