FEATURE
Revival for
Restaurant Business By Jhuma Biswas
R
estaurant business in India is slowly recovering from the severe economic jolts it suffered due to successive lockdowns but it would still require some more time for India’s restaurant business to reach pre-Covid levels of revenues and growth. On end October 2020, The Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI) wrote to the Prime Minister, appealing for a hospitality-specific relief package for saving India’s hospitality sector from collapsing. The association said that if a favourable policy for survival of India’s hospitality sector was not made then at least 40-50 percent restaurants and 3040 percent hotels in India would have to close shop, resulting in millions of job losses. Already several restaurants have closed down in India resulting in plethora of job losses in the restaurant and bar business of the country. We cannot have much hope on the callous government at the centre. In the recently tabled Union Budget for the 202122 fiscal, the centre reduced the budgetary allocation for the Ministry of Tourism by 19 percent from Rs. 2,500 crore in 2020-21 to Rs. 2026.77 crore for the forthcoming
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Hammer Food & Beverage Business Review
Feb-Mar ’21
