Here is some good news for the event industry. After almost 5 months into the lockdown the industry is set to reopen.

EEMA’s apex body in a meeting on August 20 unveiled a detailed set guidelines and SOPs for reopening the event industry. The SOPs have also been  put in front of the government authorities at the central and the state level. 

After the new NEC took over recently, EMMA’s top priority has been to find ways to reopen the business. Finally after months of suffering, there seems to be some hope in sight. 

It must be mentioned that it was EEMA’s General Secretary Siddhartha Chaturvedi who spearheaded the initiative of putting together a covid taskforce. 

The taskforce worked tirelessly over the last few weeks to come up with the guidelines detailing the SOPs for 8 different kinds of events namely —weddings/social events, corporate events, corporate activations, large conferences, government/large scale public and political events, rural events, religious events and music festivals. 

Valsa Singh Nair, Principal Secretary, Tourism & Cultural Affairs, Maharashtra unveiled the report along with Aarti Mattoo, VP, EEMA-West. 

“In every crisis there is an opportunity and the event industry has to grab the opportunity. The industry has already evolved by adapting to virtual events and will come out more resilient out of this crisis”, said Nair and assured that the Maharashtra Government will be fully supportive in opening up safe and responsible events.

“I thank all the members of the covid task force team for putting in so much hard work. The entire team brings in an experience of 300 plus years in the events domain and has come up with a bible to conduct safe events in these pandemic times”,  said Siddhartha Chaturvedi, General Secretary-NEC, EEMA.

The SOPs created by EEMA will become a strong communication point between the industry and the government as they provide assurance that the industry is capable of conducting safe events in coming times.  

The USP of this document is its transparency and the detailing with which it covers various event processes including its inception, execution and the post event SOPs. While detailing these SOPs, EEMA has also specifically kept in mind the people who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic.

Additionally, EEMA plans to conduct a series of workshops to ensure that these SOPs are followed by the event companies, clients, and various other stakeholders.

The core members of the task force included– Ankur Kalra, Vibgyor Brand Services, Arpita Gandhi, Weddingline, A Balarambabu, Violet Events, Chanchal Sanyal, QED Productions Pvt Ltd, Gunjan Arya, OML Entertainment, Khantil Mehta, Gobananas, Nikhil Aggarwal, Lallooji and Sons, Oum Pradutt, Phase 1 Events Pvt Ltd, Pawan Bansal, Jagran Solutions, Pramod Lunnawat, Millenium Events, Raghav Roy Kapoor, Livewire Events, Sanjay Kaul, Impact Communications, Sumant Jaykrishnan, Sumant Jaykrishnan Design Pvt Ltd, Vanessa Williams, Concept Conferences Pvt Ltd and Vijay Bokadia, Moksh Events Pvt Ltd.

EEMA members took the ‘EEMA Safety Pledge’ and assured to abide by these guidelines to help in the conduct of safe events.