Panaji, April 15 (IANS) The hospitality industry in India will be in a position to employ an additional 100,000 trained personnel over the next three years, a tourism industry spokesperson said here Thursday.

Sunil Kothari, a senior official of the Hotel and Restaurant Association (HRA), said there were nearly 100,000 hotel rooms being developed across tourism centres in India, and that there was a need to hire the same number of trained professionals soon. "The average ratio is one trained person per hotel room."

"There are nearly 100,000 hotel rooms being constructed all over the country. The arithmetic is simple," Kothari, a hotelier from Aurangabad, who has been appointed as the chairman of the diamond jubilee celebrations of the HRA said.

Kothari, however, said that the current rate at which both government owned and other private hotel management institutions were churning out manpower was not enough to meet the envisaged demand.

"In the next three years, only 25,000 trained persons are expected to pass out of all the hotel management institutions in India which simply does not meet our demands," Kothari said, adding that the hospitality industry had collaborated with the central government and had devised very short courses ranging from six to eight weeks to meet the shortfall of trained manpower.

The western association of the HRA, which comprises states like Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Gujarat completes 60 years of existence this year.