Cuttack: The eight-day maritime trade fair, Bali Jatra, will begin on the occasion of Kartika Purnima at Gadagadia Ghat on the banks of the Mahanadi in Odisha’s Cuttack city on Monday.
The fair commemorates 2,000-year-old maritime and cultural links between ancient Kalinga (modern Odisha) and Bali and other South and Southeast Asian regions like Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The event is marked by a massive open-air market where a variety of goods, including traditional handicrafts, are bought and sold.
The other highlights at this year’s fair include tunnel aquarium, digital exhibition, art exhibition, eco-friendly fire and multimedia and laser light shows, rural pavilion, handicrafts, urban SHG enclosure inside ‘Cuttack in Cuttack’, water sports and musical evenings.
The Odisha Rural Development and Marketing Society (ORMAS) have allotted 420 stalls to traders at the venue where art and crafts along with an array of handlooms, handicrafts, agri-horticulture value-added products, authentic spices of women producers and artisans from across 30 districts of Odisha and 22 other states like Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Manipur, Tripura, and Chhattisgarh will be showcased at Pallishree Mela. A special gallery has been set up to showcase rural Cuttack.
The food pavilion with around 30 stalls will offer delicacies from Odisha, Rajasthan, Punjab and North-Eastern states.
To encourage green practices among the people, the Cuttack Municipal Corporation (CMC) has announced monetary rewards for the vendors for depositing the recyclable waste – PET beverage (water, juice, flavoured milk and cold drinks) containers, HDPE (plastic caps, thick plastic bottles and shampoo bottles), LDPE (frozen food wrapping, condiments), PP (Tupperware, kitchenware) and tin cans at the designated centres.
Visitors can enjoy the exhilarating experience of walking through a ‘tunnel aquarium’ at Bali Jatra this year. More than 1,000 species of marine and freshwater fish including small sharks, jellyfish, whales, and various colorful ones will be kept inside the 200-foot-long aquarium. The price of the ticket will be between Rs 150 to Rs 200. A national-level art festival is also being organised, where artists from Odisha, Delhi, Bengaluru, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, will participate and showcase their creativity through canvas paintings.
BALI JATRA UTSAV
Folk dances, traditional music performances, and other cultural events, will add a festive and entertaining element to the celebration, on Ganakabi Baishnab Pani Mancha, Akshaya Mohanty Mancha, and Patha-Utsav. Besides 139 cultural troupes from across Odisha and other states, music composers Sachin-Jigar and Anu Mallik will perform at fair this year. Sachin-Jigar will perform on December 2 and Anu the following day.
ROAD MAP & TRAFFIC ADVISORY
The Commissionerate Police issued a traffic advisory and route map for the fair, which will remain effective from 2 pm everyday between November 27 and December 4.
A mobile application ‘AmaBaliyatra’ has been launched to provide real time traffic situation in Cuttack and navigate designated parking places. The violators of the traffic advisory will have to pay a minimum fine of Rs 500.
Around 55 to 60 platoons of police force will be deployed for the fair. This apart, 26 police aid posts and five watch towers will be set up for maintaining law and order.
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