The Unesco took one more step to connect with Durga Puja of Calcutta on Thursday, four years after inscribing the autumn festival on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
In a bid to make Puja accessible to all, including the specially abled, a set of guidelines formulated by IIT Kharagpur was launched. It will be followed by 24 select puja organisers this year as a pilot project.
The launch took place at the inauguration of the fourth edition of the Puja art preview show organised by the NGO massArt, which Unesco has partnered since the inception. Unesco had approached the state government and IIT Kharagpur for help to increase accessibility on receiving an appeal from MassArt.
The report was launched at Rajdanga Naboday Sangha in Kasba in presence of mayor and minister Firhad Hakim, minister of state for tourism Indranil Sen and Unesco south Asia regional office director Tim Curtis, the Unesco representative to Bhutan, India, Maldives and Sri Lanka.
Referring to the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disability to participate in cultural life on an equal footing as others, Curtis advocated access for all to “make Durga puja truly sarbojanin”.
“Restricting access hinders the participation also of elderly persons and pregnant women. We will all face this at some stage of our lives. We wanted to develop a standard operating procedure to address accessibility measures in Durga puja, and in cultural festivals at large. This includes practical steps like building infrastructure, training volunteers, emergency preparedness etc to foster attitudes of change,” Curtis said.
The question of accessibility, he pointed out, was not charity but justice as persons with disabilities were not beneficiaries but leaders in creating inclusive cultural spaces with their inputs.
Unesco had reached out to IIT Kharagpur to frame the guidelines and to the state government, to seek help for its implementing partner massArt.
An IIT Kharagpur team did a recce of some pandals and held a workshop on September 12 at Sisir Mancha. “We undertook role playing and simulating exercises so the volunteers from participating pujas could understand the problems faced by people with disabilities,” Prof. Haimanti Banerji of the department of architecture and regional planning, IIT Kharagpur, told Metro.
The 45-page document her team has created includes sketches with generic points which organisers can customise, covering the entire experience from the vehicle drop-off point to the pandal exit.
The Hindi version of the document will be launched in Delhi on September 23 and will be prescribed for Durga Pujas in the Capital, she said.
Information and cultural affairs principal secretary Santanu Basu promised to extend the accessibility guidelines to other pujas of Calcutta and later to the districts. “After the initial celebration over the Unesco recognition, we have come to understand the responsibility. It is a continued process. The 24 pujas need to implement the guidelines well this year to show the way to the others,” he said.