Amid spike in Covid cases, National Youth Festival in Puducherry to go online

Due to the rising number of Covid cases, the upcoming 25th National Youth Festival in Puducherry has been made a virtual event, a government official said on Monday.

The Union Youth Affairs and Sports Ministry has decided to conduct the event in virtual mode for two days on January 12 and 13, a release from Director of School Education of Puducherry government P T Rudra Goud said.

He said the in-person event relating to the festival being hosted by the Puducherry administration has been cancelled by the ministry and the festival would be held through virtual mode.

Goud said Prime Minister Narendra Modi would inaugurate the festival at 11 am on January 12 virtually from New Delhi.

Earlier, it was planned that the Prime Minister would visit the Union Territory and kickstart the festival which was scheduled to be held between January 12 to 16. But the continued spike in coronavirus cases has pushed the ministry to cancel the physical events and hold it through virtual mode.

The director said a virtual platform: https://nyf2022.org/ has been developed with a capacity to host five lakh concurrent users. The participants can access the virtual platform only through registration, which requires their basic details and e-mail address.