Background: 
Regional Tourism Development Scheme (RTDS) focus upon developing regional tourism within Maharashtra with a primary thrust in rural tourism, sustainable tourism, agro tourism etc. promoting economic development in developing areas of the state. 
Under RTDS scheme, the district development officers have opportunity to apply for tourism led development projects to Directorate of Tourism, Govt. of Maharashtra. The districts, under the RTDS scheme, can take up destination development or related projects/works which focus upon further upgradation of the destination. Apart from destination developments, RTDS schemes also enables the state to aggregate detailed data pertaining to destination and tourism development taking place in the state, maintain the fund flow and engage in grassroot level development of tourism assets and infrastructures. It also holds scope for developing MAHA Destination Development Plan within the state.

The objectives of the project are preparation of i.) Destination Assessment in terms of destination tourism statistics, connectivity, infrastructures and ICT readiness, ii) Development Strategies considering the identified opportunities, gaps / challenges at the destination, iii) Assist in capacity building and branding and marketing. 

Our Approach
Primus Partners focused upon providing driven decision-making mechanisms through technical and strategic consultancy which can be easily scaled up further for implementation of RTDS and likely schemes. The approaches taken are: 
o    Formulating inventory and methodology for data standardization and digitization.
o    Preparation of standard operating procedure for destination/ project assessment.
o    Administrative capacity building. 
o    Monitoring the project scheme implementation. 
o    Preparation of strategy plan for MAHA Destination Development as a part of RTDS.
o    Identification of projects which can be scaled into MAHA Destination projects and prepare and promote the same for increasing tourism led development in destinations and in districts.

Benefits
o    The key benefit involves in managing and monitoring the data regarding the disbursement of fund periodically in real time
o    Model SoP for destination & project assessment for understanding the scope for future development and sub sectors to focus in
o    Helping the department to promote a data driven decision making with high level transparency.
o    Proper channelling of funds and marginalizing the scope of duplication error. 
o    Capacity building of the department for collection, standardization, analysing and visualization of data
o    Smoothening the fund flow mechanism under the scheme.
o    Researching on innovative concept pertaining developing destination centric tourism and involving local community in the same and upgrading the socio-economic skills.