The Royal Institute for Tourism and Hospitality (RITH) will be delinked from the Tourism Council of Bhutan (TCB) by June next year. It has been almost eight years since the institute proposed for its autonomy. The Tourism Council of Bhutan also supported the institute’s proposal.
Currently, the RITH is functioning under TCB. So the institute doesn’t have financial autonomy. It depends on the TCB for its budget.
“The mandate of RITH and TCB is completely different. TCB looks after policy while the RITH handles the training part. The human resource requirement is different and these are all conflicting issues. Budget allocation is another issue. When the finance ministry allocates the budget in bulk, it has to be divided between the institute and TCB,” said Ugyen Dorji, officiating principal of RITH.
As per the cabinet’s directive, the Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC) conducted an Organisational Development or OD exercise to delink RITH from TCB in 2019. The OD exercise recommended that it will be best to delink the institute from TCB since they have different policies and objectives.
“The cabinet’s directive is to not only delink RITH from the TCB but also from the RCSC and make it a self-financing sustainable organisation,” said Dorji Dhradul, the Director-General of TCB. We believe, as an independent autonomous organization, RITH has a huge potential to grow itself into a premier or a centre of excellence in tourism and hospitality not only in the region but globally also and that is very relevant with the global reputation Bhutan has in terms of tourism. But having said that even after getting delinked, I would say that involvement of TCB with RITH would be even stronger,” said Dorji Dhradul, Director-General of TCB.
RITH was founded in 2003 and became a fully-fledged institute in 2010. It offers diploma in Tourism Management and Hotel Management.
Choni Dema
