East Himalaya festival from today

SILIGURI, Jan. 8. - Private tour operators, along with certain organisations and schools, are all set to kick off the month-long East Himalaya Festival at Chitrey Beach, Teesta River, tomorrow.

As a matter of fact, the entire festival was once a government initiative. Till 2001, the state government organised this festival as the Teesta Tea and Tourism Festival involving Darjeeling, Sikkim and the Dooars. The festival later graduated into an extravaganza involving West Bengal, Sikkim, the northeastern states and Bhutan, and had been coined as The East Himalaya Festival. `But suddenly everything came to a standstill, and the government failed to organise the festival in 2002,` said Mr Kalyan Deb, the coordinator of the festival, while addressing a press conference.

Last year, a total of nine private tour operators had jointly organised the festival and this year, so far, 56 organisations have come together to organise it. `We are hopeful that more organisations would join us in the years to come` said Mr Deb.

He informed that this year, tour operators and schools from Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Assam had joined hands with the other organisations to organise the festival. Mr Raj Basu, a private tour operator of Siliguri, said that they would organise this festival without any government support each year.

Courtesy
The Statesman

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