Int’l kite festival begins in Kumari tomorrow

MADURAI: Kanniyakumari, a coastal district in Tamil Nadu, situated in the southernmost tip of India, is gearing up for the ‘kite festival’, the first international competition of its kind to be held this week.

The three-day international festival is set to kick off on August 4. The local economy of Kanniyakumari, which is blessed abundantly by nature with magnificent waterfalls, forests, and wildlife, is dependent on tourism.

“The first edition of the Tamil Nadu International Kite Festival took off in Chennai last year,” sources said on Wednesday.

Kanniyakumari Collector PN Sridhar said the festival, which is to be hosted by the Department of Tourism, Tamil Nadu in association with the district administration, would commence at Sunset Point in Kanniyakumari from 2 pm to 7 pm, on Friday and similar timings on the next two consecutive days at Sanguthurai beach.

The festival provides opportunities for several operators from countries abroad including Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore to get their kites in over 50 different vibrant colours to reach new heights. Moreover, he stressed that the festival is not open to individual participants.

Ahead of the festival, the beaches are being cleaned up to facilitate the event and officials inspected the preparatory works.

Further, the Collector said Kanniyakumari attracts quite a lot of tourists. During 2021, around 38 lakh tourists from various parts visited hotspots and the district witnessed a whopping increase in their arrival touching 1.64 crore. Until June this year, Kanniyakumari saw an inflow of 55 lakh tourists.

In June alone, as many as 1,50,441 tourists paid a visit to Vivekananda Memorial Rock and Thiruvalluvar Statue. Above all, other vacation hotspots across the district attracted a total of around seven lakh tourists in the same month. The tourism industry has been creating self-employment opportunities.

“The sunrise-sunset point along Kanniyakumari beach is the most visited tourist attraction and development works were being carried out by the district administration,” he said.