The man who initaitied the Public- Private sector partnership (PPP), which is the driving force of Kerala Tourism and the success mantra of Kerala – God’s Own Country brand Some institutions are built by committee. Kerala Travel Mart was built by conviction – the conviction, held by a handful of entrepreneurs returning from a trade fair in Berlin in 2000, that Kerala’s tourism industry needed to stop competing for attention on other people’s terms and start speaking for itself. Among that founding group was E.M. Najeeb, who would serve an unprecedented five terms – as a founding committee member and later as President across three separate terms steering KTM from a modest experiment into what is today recognised as Kerala’s most successful institutional model and the country’s most enduring example of a genuine public-private partnership in tourism.
Where It Began:
A Brainstorm After Berlin
The origin story, as Najeeb tells it, is disarmingly simple. “Kerala Tourism has been participating, along with its partners in the private sector, in various international marts like ITB, WTM, and so on,” he recalls.
“In 2000, after the ITB in Berlin, we all came back and decided to sit together under the leadership of Amitabh Kant and Dr. Venu at Cochin, with a small core group, to establish a public-private partnership and a systematic approach to marketing Kerala.” Out of that brainstorming session came the idea for a travel mart built specifically around Kerala – one that would give the state’s own entrepreneurs a stage to exhibit their products and negotiate directly with international and domestic tour operators, while showcasing “Kerala’s beauty from Trivandrum to Kasaragod.”
The plan, Najeeb says, was modest at first. But that first edition brought in 400 to 500 international buyers and another 300 to 400 domestic buyers – numbers that, for a first-of-its-kind, single-state initiative, amounted to “a real resounding success.”
That early validation gave the founding group the confidence to institutionalise what they had started, settling on a biennial rhythm that would let both small and large entrepreneurs draw sustained national and international business over the years that followed.
Five Terms, One Principle: Teamwork Over Turf
Najeeb’s own account of his presidency – spanning the founding committee, his second and third terms, and a return in the fifth term after Jose Dominic’s tenure in the fourth – repeatedly circles back to one idea: KTM’s success was never a solo achievement. “It was always a teamwork,” he says, describing Managing Committee meetings held in the presence of the Tourism Secretary, the Director of Tourism, and the KTDC Managing Director, where government and private-sector suggestions were weighed together.
His own background as a tour operator gave him a particular challenge early on – winning the confidence of hoteliers despite what he candidly describes as “some kind of trust deficit” between hoteliers and tour operators at the time. That he managed to bring both sides to the same table, without disrupting KTM’s functioning, counts among his first real successes as President.
The milestones that followed were substantial. Under his leadership, KTM matured into a genuine brand, hosting thousands of buyers from across India and internationally. Najeeb leaned directly on his standing in the travel trade to make this happen – for ten to fifteen years, he was the leading agent for nearly every major airline operating into Kerala, and he used those relationships to secure hosted-buyer support, including complimentary business and economy tickets that airlines once offered to bring international buyers into Cochin. “Those hosted buyers have been very, very useful for the growth of Kerala Tourism,” he says – even as he notes, with a trace of nostalgia, that airlines no longer extend that kind of support today, leaving the cost of hosting buyers to fall more heavily on the industry itself.
The Model No One Else Has Replicated If there is one decision Najeeb regards as KTM’s defining achievement, it is the choice to keep the mart exclusively Kerala’s own.“The best design of KTM was a single travel mart focusing on one state alone, which is actually very unusual,” he says. Only entrepreneurs licensed to operate in Kerala – with GST registration, offices, properties, or resorts in the state – have ever been allocated stalls. Despite sustained pressure from national-level interests to open participation to other states, Najeeb and his fellow leaders held the line. “This is an absolutely different and successful model which cannot be seen anywhere else in India,” he says – a claim that, twenty-five years on, remains essentially unchallenged.
That same instinct for protecting the ecosystem extended to KTM’s smallest participants. From the outset, Najeeb made sure homestays, souvenir shops, and single-owner backwater boat operators could exhibit at KTM for a fraction of what a national trade show would have cost them – access that let small entrepreneurs build genuine brands and secure business from domestic and international operators alike, and that, in his telling, drew a wave of new entrants into the sector who might otherwise have pursued conventional employment.
Weathering Crisis, Building Institutions
Najeeb’s tenure was not without turbulence. He recalls a particularly difficult period when a change in government led to unauthorised-construction demolitions across tourism destinations, including Munnar, leaving entrepreneurs who had taken loans to build resorts deeply anxious
about their investments. It was this crisis, specifically, that led Najeeb and industry leaders to found the Confederation of Kerala Tourism Industry – a deliberate move, he explains, to keep such politically sensitive battles separate from KTM’s role as the marketing arm between government and private trade, so that government officials were never placed in an awkward position by KTM taking up adversarial issues. The Confederation has since grown into the umbrella body representing tourism trade organisations across the state, with Najeeb serving as its President.
Kerala Tourism also weathered floods, the Nipah virus, dengue outbreaks, and global financial downturns during his years of leadership- each met, he says, with a now-familiar formula: solidarity within the industry, transparent engagement with government, and sustained outreach to international media and partners to correct the record when news coverage outran the ground reality
Beyond Kerala: A Pan-India Legacy Najeeb’s influence has never stopped at Kerala’s borders. As a member of both the National and State Tourism Advisory Committees, he has carried lessons from KTM’s PPP model into national policy conversations, and is widely credited as
the pioneer behind Kerala’s early push into medical value travel – a segment he helped position not just as a Kerala offering, but as a template later studied at the national level. It is, in many ways, the same instinct that built KTM in the first place: the belief that Kerala’s tourism industry does its best work not by waiting for the government to lead, but by walking alongside it – as partners, not petitioners..
Also Read
Watch on Youtube
