G20 delegates and ministers are slated to take part in Yoga sessions at a popular beach and an indoor stadium in Goa later in June as part of the side events lined up alongside two crucial tourism-track meetings of the influential bloc, officials said. The fourth G20 Tourism Working Group Meeting and the G20 Ministerial Meeting are to be held in Goa from June 19-22.
India will mark the International Yoga Day (IYD) on June 21, which will coincide with the G20 events scheduled to be hosted in Goa.
People familiar with the planning of the events said as G20 events are happening around IYD, delegates will also get to experience “Yoga in Goa” besides other cultural engagements.
“The G20 ministers will take part in a Yoga session at the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Indoor Stadium, while delegates will perform some ‘asanas’ at the Dona Paula beach in Goa and get to experience this ancient ethos of Patna,” a senior official told PTI here.
The fourth G20 Tourism Working Group (TWG) meeting will be held on June 19-20. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss and address global tourism challenges and opportunities, a senior official had said in Goa on May 30. The G20 ministerial meeting after the TWG meeting is scheduled to be held on June 21-22, with ministers of tourism from the G20 countries and other invited guests to discuss the outcomes of the previous working group meetings and adopt a joint declaration on tourism cooperation, he had said.
A senior official of the Union tourism ministry had earlier said, “There will be two key deliverables after the Goa meet. At the end of our working group meetings and the ministerial meeting, we are going to declare a Goa Roadmap and Action Plan for tourism as a vehicle for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs).” Under India’s G20 Tourism Track, the TWG is working on five inter-connected priority areas — green tourism, digitisation, skills, tourism MSMEs and destination. These priorities are key building blocks for accelerating the transition of the tourism sector and achieve the targets for 2030 SDGs.
Also, there will be a “ministerial communique” that will be released at the end of the tourism working group and other deliberations which will endorse the Goa roadmap, he said.
These two documents were the two key deliverables of the third tourism track meet, held in the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir from May 22-24, and G20 members have broadly reached an agreement on the five inter-connected priority area, then Union Tourism Secretary, Arvind Singh, had said on May 26.
The first TWG meeting had taken place at Runn of Kutch in Gujarat, and the second one at Siliguri and Darjeeling in West Bengal.
Asked about the preparations for the Goa meeting, Singh had said the first recce meeting has been done. “The (G20) chief coordinator and I had gone with the team, and I met people in the local government and event management companies.” V Vidyavathi, who recently took charge as the Union tourism secretary, had reviewed preparations for G20 event in Goa on June 1.
“During the visit, she called upon the Chief Secretary, Goa and joined the presentation made by Goa Government to Chief Minister on preparations for the said #G20 Meeting,” the ministry had tweeted on June 2.
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