The government appears to be taking a wait-and-see approach before any formal decision is made regarding the Visit Nepal 2020 campaign.

In the face of the global coronavirus epidemic, the government has yet to take a formal decision on the fate of the much-vaunted tourism campaign. So far, only international promotional activities have been cancelled, amid widespread calls to postpone the campaign.

Despite Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli’s instruction to the Tourism Ministry to postpone the Visit Nepal 2020 last Sunday, confusion continues to persist, as the government has not officially announced whether the tourism campaign is cancelled, postponed or continued.

Finance Minister Yubaraj Khatiwada, who is also the government’s spokesperson, told the press at the weekly Thursday briefing that for now, all programmes, including international promotional activities for the Visit Nepal 2020 campaign, had been called off.

“Based on the status of the Covid-19, we will take necessary steps and announce the plan accordingly,” he said.

Normally, the government on Thursday makes public all its weekly Cabinet decisions in writing but Khatiwada did not mention the status of Visit Nepal explicitly.

Kedar Bahadur Adhikari, the Tourism Ministry secretary, told the Post that they will first complete an evaluation of the campaign before taking a concrete decision.

“For now, it’s stopped, and decisions regarding how the campaign should move will be decided once the prime minister returns to office,” said Adhikari, who did not clarify what exactly ‘stopped’ meant and for how long.

Oli is currently in hospital after undergoing a kidney transplant on Wednesday.

The Visit Nepal Secretariat, an ad-hoc body formed to oversee tourism promotions and coordinate the campaign, also awaits the government’s decision about its future. The Secretariat had prepared various programmes and projects for this fiscal year with an estimated budget of Rs617.4 million.

An official at the Secretariat, who did not wish to be named, said they have already released payments of Rs140 million as of February-end. Last fiscal year, the Secretariat spent Rs46 million on promotional activities abroad and on various events in the country.

According to Adhikari, the fate of the Visit Nepal Secretariat will also be decided at a future meeting with the prime minister.

The lack of clarity over Visit Nepal even extends to the Nepal Tourism Board, the country’s tourism promotion body. While the Tourism Ministry said that the campaign has been “stopped”, board officials believe that only promotional activities have been cancelled.

Dhananjay Regmi, CEO of Nepal Tourism Board, said that the campaign has neither been postponed nor cancelled.

“For the time being, promotional activities have been halted,” he said. “We have an option of moving to domestic tourism but we have yet to decide. Right now, we cannot do anything because we should understand the ground reality of the ongoing crisis.”

The Visit Nepal 2020 campaign was planned to revitalise Nepal’s tourism industry after the earthquakes of 2015. The Post-Disaster Needs Assessment report had urged the government to announce 2017 and 2018 as Visit Nepal years to reassure visitors that reconstruction and rehabilitation would be completed by then.

The comprehensive report prepared by the National Planning Commission had said there was the need to rebuild and re-brand the image of tourism, and significant efforts and resources would be required to do so. Subsequently, the Policy and Programmes for 2016-17 announced the launch of Visit Nepal Year 2018.

However, the Tourism Ministry was forced to postpone the 2018 campaign to 2020 due to the slow pace of road and airport upgradation, and reconstruction of historical monuments and cultural heritage sites.

But the 2020 campaign has been embroiled in controversy from the very beginning with entrepreneurs saying the campaign appears bound to fail. That the position of chief of the Tourism Board remained vacant for much of January, even after the campaign was launched with much fanfare, should have been a dead giveaway. But things started going downhill much earlier.

The website for Visit Nepal 2020 did not have any promotional content until at least mid-September, for instance. The Finance Ministry did not release the budget to carry out promotional activities on time. The coronavirus epidemic put the final nail on the coffin of Visit Nepal.