New Delhi: Having plenty of unemployed in a country cannot be a problem, if you know how to train them to be employable. In fact, they are assets in a new found world, where innovative minds develop in professional fields.

The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has started a new school named 'School of Tourism and Hospitality Service Sectoral Management (SOTHSSM)' and is hopeful of training over 25 lakh young people in about 10 years from now for the tourism and hospitality industries.

The existing tourism-related courses, which the varsity has been running for a long time, were the firsts by any open university of the world.

The new venture will follow a slew of additional programmes for Diploma, Bachelor, Masters, M.Phil. and PhD degrees.

"The focus will have a number of novelties, which will be the IGNOU USPs. These are yet to be conceptualised by any university of the world so far. For all courses, learners will be taught and trained through a mix of online, face-to-face and the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) mode", an official from the varsity said.

The university recently tied up with the National Council for Hotel Management and Catering Technology (NCHMCT) to start B.Sc. and M.Sc. programmes in Hospitality and Hotel Management in a collaborative model with the Ministry of Tourism.

These courses are the firsts in their respective areas world over.

"The school targets two well-defined fields to cover: Tourism and Hospitality. Both these fields individually prop up tertiary activities such as culinary, housekeeping, maintenance, interior decoration, traveling, hotel management, development of crafts through cottage industries etc", the official added.

The courses will be inter-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary and based on sectoral research.

Asked of the guiding principles behind the programmes, Academic Coordinator of the Tourism Department at IGNOU, Prof. Ravindra Kumar said, "Tourism has massive heritage base. Without understanding the theory of tourism, we can't run the programme successfully. Besides, uncontrolled Tourism activities in environmental zones might lead to a disastrous situation. Ecology is fragile. Controlled tourism alone will sustain it. It should be understood as a subject of study and not taken as an activity just for earning money."

The IGNOU School of Tourism and Hospitality, therefore, functions with a number of novel features.

First, the courses of study judiciously mix the academic content with its application.

Second, the programmes eye to tap the massive potentials of human resources in the country. Convergence of theoretical aspects with practical on-the-job trainings makes the programmes unique, which the conventional classroom tourism/hospitality trainings cannot match.

A large contingent of tourism professionals who are already in the industry for over a few decades, but have gone complacent with times, will benefit by this new knowledge for skill-development at their work-situations.

Third, the programme will have pan-Indian focus, which none of the conventional curricula ensures.

Fourth is the flexibility in the courses. "Whenever necessary, we can cut out a segment of the programme and make it region-specific and target it to a specified-clientele. This scope doesn't exist in the tourism curriculae of any other university of the world," explained Prof. Kumar.

Fifth, and the last, is that the lessons will be imparted in technology-enabled processes, which are IGNOU's USPs. Through the satellite-based face-to-face classroom lesson dissemination technique, IGNOU stands out alone in the world today.

The IGNOU think-tank is closely monitoring how the tourism and hospitality sectors response to the programmes.