230 hotels join Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Clean India drive
Vikramjit and Arjun, heirs of the Oberoi Group, picked up brooms and pushed wheelbarrows along with some of their employees the other day to collect all the garbage along the streets of Civil Lines in Delhi. "For our general managers, it wasn't a choice," said Vikramjit Oberoi, chief operating officer and joint MD of the group's flagship EIH Limited. "And we went beyond just the cleaning process.
We even started to paint walls in the areas in the vicinity." While he and his cousin didn't venture out on any such exercise after that day, hundreds of employees of Oberoi and several other luxury and mid-market hotel chains, including the Taj, ITC, Leela, Carlson and the Park, have started cleaning roads around their hotels as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Swachh Bharat Mission.
In what the industry calls a firstof-its-kind initiative, 230 hotels, including 170 major ones, under the Hotel Association of India, have pledged that more than 500 of their employees will clean about 230 km of road around their hotels and clean up around 53 monuments in the country. "It is a big country and the only way a movement resonate beyond just lip service, is, when everybody embraces it," said Oberoi, who is also the president of the Hotel Association of India.
"It's simple and directly proportional: if the country isn't clean, we attract less tourists," he said, pointing out that it makes eminent sense for the hospitality sector to embrace the government's clean India initiative. EIH has tasked at least three employees per hotels to dedicatedly clean the areas around their hotels.
Several five-star chains have beautified the areas around their hotels for years. The ITC Maurya and Taj Palace Hotels in Delhi and The Leela in Mumbai are examples of hotels that have kept pavement plants well-pruned and dust free.
Now they plan to do more. "All participating hotel are cleaning more than just the immediate surroundings and will cover a wider radius," said Nakul Anand, executive director at ITC who oversees hospitality, travel & tourism and lifestyle retail businesses of the Kolkata-based conglomerate.
Industry executives said it's difficult to define the size of the areas to be cleaned as its spread widely across geographies. Each partner hotel is working on the project as a single unit, setting its own goal and deciding how to go about it.
Some hotels have given the power to general managers to schedule cleaning activities, while some others have dedicated staff to look after surrounding areas, clean nearby railway stations or public toilets around monuments.
Some groups have advised each hotel to ensure that the four streets and roads surrounding the hotel are kept clean, which includes painting dirty walls and removing rubble and garbage. Taj Hotels, for example, lets general managers take a call as to when each hotel will clean the area. "If I can trust my general manager to manage a $100 million asset, I can trust them to get the areas around the hotels cleaned," said Rakesh Sarna, the newly appointed chief executive officer of the Tata hotel group.
He said the extra cost for this will be negligible at least for large hotels that have workforces of several thousands. The next step, according to Sarna, is enforcing conditions that they will only do business with vendors who keep their premises clean.
Budget hotel company Sarovar Hotels is looking at reducing its garbage footprint. "Indians have always believed in keeping their homes sanitised only. We want to galvanise this into a larger movement," its executive director Ajay Bakaya said.
RK Puri, secretary general at the Hotel Association of India, said the government's ITDC hotels will also be a part of this movement.
The body is currently debating whether they should have a rewards programme for staffers who put in the maximum time on such programmes.
Big chains said they haven't hired additional staff for this or cut their corporate social responsibility budget.