Since 1999, the Hornbill Festival, supposed to be a fusion of the cultural showcase into a week-long celebration, has come a long way today with addition of other items to its festivity. The festival, coinciding with the statehood day is relevant in the context of the reassertion of heterogeneous groups towards the Naga homogeneity. In all these efforts at promoting or showcasing Naga culture, Kisama has been birthed to become the cultural Eden for the Hornbill Festival as well as Mecca of Naga cultural event, running through the first week of December every year. According to the government, the Hornbill Festival 2024 is to be celebrated in a grand way this year which marks the 25th anniversary. Sometimes ideas run out or simply because visitors find it hard to relax and enjoy since everything about Hornbill is the hectic schedules and the distances of venues that have to be travelled to Kisama through Kohima where traffic moves at snail\u2019s pace. It is time for the organisers of the Hornbill to also take note of other matters so as to promote tourist travel. Several years back, this newspaper had commented in this columns that it was time to \u2018privatise\u2019 enterprise in Nagaland as the government cannot and should not patronize business at its cost. The government must focus on infrastructure development to provide good and wide roads, efficient network of transportation services and bringing much improvement in rail and air communications. Trade, travel and tourism are channels of free enterprise that people use and pay for services rendered. The government of Nagaland appears to show no interest for development of air travel as Dimapur airport is being consigned to be a feeder airport even as Assam is likely to build a modern airport near Diphu. So also train services at Dimapur have become greatly reduced as many trains are bypassing the state and even those trains that used to emanate at Dimapur have been taken to Assam such as Jan Shatabdi, BG Express, Nagaland Express etc. Both airport and railway station are condemned due to encroachment and this will be the cause for Nagaland losing whatever little it has. Tourists visiting the Hornbill may do so for different reasons. There are states which attract tourists with their agro produce such as the wines in Meghalaya , oranges in Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh. Nagaland could base its appeal with Agri tourism as there is ample evidence of horticulture and floriculture which people in general are familiar with. A successful 25th anniversary should not be the objective of tourism but how the state earns goodwill as a state where cultural and eco tourism along with the charm and hospitality can be embedded in the minds of visitors. The authorities need to check exorbitance otherwise the entire show might collapse one day if the expenditure is not justified. At the end of the day, there has to be an assessment of what worthwhile gains have been achieved from of all these efforts. It is also time for the government of Nagaland to realise that it should focus on roads, electricity, water and governance instead of acting like a big event management corporation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since 1999, the Hornbill Festival, supposed to be a fusion of the cultural showcase into a week-long celebration, has come a long way today with addition of other items to its festivity. The festival, coinciding with the statehood day is relevant in the context of the reassertion of heterogeneous groups towards the Naga homogeneity. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}