Riding a wave

The four-day Digha Beach Festival gets bigger than ever, with paragliders, speedboats, jet skis and a Tent Village.

Forget Goa. The seaside resorts of Digha and Mandarmani near Kolkata will be the future tourist destinations. This was West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s promise as she inaugurated the four-day Digha and Mandarmani Beach Festival on Friday.

With the government going all out to make the point, the festival has turned out to be the largest such event organised at the state’s most popular sea resort. The 30 km stretch between Digha and Mandarmani beaches is packed with activities like beach cricket, beach volleyball, kabaddi and all-terrain bike competitions. Scores of tourists can be seen enjoying on speed boats, jet skis, sand bikes and banana boats. For the first time, tourist and locals are getting to experience the thrill of riding what is said to be the world’s fastest jet ski, the 26X, on the salty waters of the Bay of Bengal. Paragliders and paragliding experts have been specially brought in from Goa. A Tent Village has come up a few kilometres away. All in all, the tourism ministry has spent Rs 3 crore on the festival.

Located 187 km southwest of Kolkata, Digha is easily accessible by both rail and road. Seven trains ply between Kolkata and Digha every day. And, there is a regular bus service. “Digha beach has huge potential for water sports activities,” says Balesh Maloo from Aqua World, a private body which organises water sports. He says his company is participating in the beach festival to popularise water sports. “We also plan to set up a permanent shack on the beach,” adds Maloo.

At the Udaipur Beach, some kilometres from the new Digha Beach, the tourism department has set up a Tent Village which will offer “tourists the experience of staying in luxury tents,” says Tourism Minister Rachchpal Singh. The Tent Village will be thrown open to public after the festival.

But how can a beach festival be complete without a seafood festival? The fishing village adjacent to New Digha is the venue for the seafood festival, where tourists can pick their favourite fish — hilsa, pomfret, petki — or prawn, which will then be cooked in front of them.

The coastal villages in the area are also making the most of the festival. “We have not seen such tourist turnout in a long time,” says Sheuli Maku who has a shop in the local handicrafts market. Maku sells wall-hangings, lampshades, pens and ornaments made from seashells. Other stalls at the beachside market are selling local items like bags, mats, lampshades made from jute and cane, pearl jewellery and conch shell goods like shakha which us worn by married Bengali women.

Concerts by musicians like Babul Supriyo, Raghab Chatterjee and Anupam Roy, and dance performances by Tanusree Shankar’s group and Rituparna Sengupta and her troupe are also part of the festival.

In the past, there have been reports of rowdy tourists and prostitution spoiling the atmosphere at Digha. Over time, scores of illegal hotels have also mushroomed in the area. “We are trying to deal with illegal construction and immoral activities,” says the tourism minister. “We are cancelling licences and are keeping a strict vigil on hotels and tourist lodges,” he adds.

Apart from the West Bengal police which has been roped in for security, 20 trained divers from the Kolkata-based Sea Explorers’ Institute are on standby to prevent any untoward incident during the festival.

The government says it wants to change the notion of tourism in Digha, once and for all.

The Digha Beach Festival is on till January 16