As the world marked Tourism Day yesterday, the KalimpongII Integrated Tourism Awareness Society (KITAS) has stressed on education in developing a rural area.

“Education is the need of the hour to develop a rural area,” is one of the concepts being followed by the organisation, and keeping this in mind, it has decided to sponsor the tuition fees for around 50 children belonging to the financially weaker section of society for three months, beginning October.

KITAS comprises about 150 homestay owners and was formed in 2012.

“Commemorating World Tourism Day-2020, KITAS has decided to sponsor around 50 under-privileged students from remote villages for their tuitions. These students were unable to attend classes ever since the lockdown started. These remote places also lack good network for online classes. As they are financially weak, they were unable to take private tuitions too,” KITAS secretary Rajeeb Sahi said.

The children belong to the Lingsey gram Panchayat in Kalimpong district, a remote area in the Bengal-Sikkim border, which has been mostly locked out since the Covid pandemic started.

“This year, the theme of World Tourism Day is Tourism and Rural Development and we felt that education plays a vital role in developing rural areas, along with building an infrastructure for developing it, due to which we decided to sponsor the children,” said Norden M Lepcha, an executive member of KITAS.

According to him, these children from Pitamchen and Mulkarga, who had been studying in government schools, were not able to study during the pandemic, mainly due to problems like road connectivity and poor Internet network.

“Those who could afford have either sent their children to private tuitions or have kept them in places where facilities like tuition or Internet are available. But the children we have decided to sponsor do not have this,” said Mr Lepcha, adding that these children are from Class 1 to Class 8.

KITAS will be paying around Rs 9000 per teacher as tuition fees for three months.

Incidentally, the two teachers who will be taking the tuition classes have also been affected by the pandemic.

They used to teach in Bihar and Sikkim, but had to return due to the situation. KITAS yesterday also felicitated Algarah BDO Subarna Mazumdar and Joint BDO Algarah-II in Kalimpong, Nurpundee Lepcha, for their tireless effort in the all-round development of the local people and society.