OOTY: The Government Museum here has joined hands with the Nilgiri Documentation Centre (NDC) to organise the Nilgiri Bicentenary Exhibition at the museum that will go on till the end of this month.
Inaugurating the exhibition, Mr Dharmalingam Venugopal, director of NDC, called on students of history and tourism of the nearby Government Arts College (GAC) to start a 'live tourism lab' to promote the heritage of 'Stone House', the first ever modern building to have come up in the hills way back in 1823, and which is now part of the GAC. It will also help gain hands-on experience of tourism for their future livelihood.
He suggested that students can form a group, create a website.
Brochures giving information about the history and heritage of Stone House and organise a Stone House (heritage) Tour on weekends and holidays for a reasonable fee.
The amount generated can be used to sustain their promotional activities, it was opined. Such an endeavor is bound to attract tourists from India and abroad, he pointed out.
He said that the Nilgiris mountains are believed to have a geological history of about 2,000 years. The written record on Nilgiris is over 400 years old.
The modern era of the Nilgiris began 200 years ago when John Sullivan, the then collector of Coimbatore, ascended the mountains on January 8, 2019. Nilgiris became the first hill station of the British Empire. Later it was the summer capital of Madras Presidency from 1870 to 1937.
The exhibition will feature photographs of John Sullivan and developments in the district over 200 years, he noted.
