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    National Policy on Standards for Adventure Activities

    April 21, 2017

    Adventure Tourism and Adventure Training is fast becoming a popular industry. The Central Project Management Unit of the Ministry of National Policy and Economic Affairs, in furtherance of their Tourism development initiative and the Policy Development Office of the Prime Minister’s Office, together with the Sri Lanka Tourist Development Board recently convened a meeting of service providers and regulators in the sector. The idea was to promote self-regulation.

    There are International Standards for all adventure activities; the need was for Sri Lankan Standards, equal to international Standards to be developed. The Sri Lanka Bureau of Standards is already involved in this task. They were present and agreed to involve all stake holders in this process. The meeting decided on some important follow up steps.  The SLTDB will have a web site on which all locations at which Adventure Activities are provided by service providers will be listed. The Sri Lanka Navy will convene a meeting of all water based adventure service providers to assess the present status, e.g. like at the wreck of the HMS Hermes off Batticoloa. In the same way, Sri Lanka Air Force will coordinate air based adventure activities through a meeting of stake holders. In the same way, the Special Forces of the Army will focus of land based adventure. On the emergency communication and search and rescue the TRC will coordinate with telecommunication service providers and health and emergency-first responders, to have a common number to call in case of a crisis. The Policy Development Office (PDO) of Prime Minister’s Office will work with the PM’s Committee of Vocational Training to develop a National Standard Qualification for Adventure Trainers. The Sri Lanka Insurance Board will look into the insurance cover aspect of adventure providers and participants.

     

    The consensus view of the meeting, was that Adventure Tourism and Training will be increasing in popularity exponentially, and that the industry service providers should prepare for this and have best practice safety standards available in the future.

     

    20 April 2017

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