Fruit show to start from Saturday

May 26, 2017 07:59 pm | Updated 07:59 pm IST - UDHAGAMANDALAM

The 59th Fruit Show is all set to take place at the Sims Park in Coonoor from Saturday. With the completion of the show, the summer festival season will come to a close.

Since Thursday, horticulture department workers have been busy making preparations of exhibits and fruit sculptures at the venue. The sculptures will mostly be themed around the bull-taming sport of jallikattu, with horticulture departments from 10 districts also putting up fruit sculptures of native breeds of cattle.

Sources said that since the inauguration of the vegetable show in Kotagiri, which helped kick off the summer festival season, lakhs of tourists visited the various parks and gardens in the district, with the Government Botanical Garden drawing the most number of tourists.

Joint Director of Horticulture, the Nilgiris, N. Mani, said that the summer festival thus far was a huge and resounding success and hoped that visitors would also throng the fruit festival.

However, despite traffic arrangements made by the police to ensure that there were no gridlocks, the routes surrounding the Botanical Garden especially became clogged with traffic, especially during the weekends. But thanks to the great planning by the district police, most tourists managed to reach the garden and leave without too many delays.

But V. Sivadas, managing trustee of the Nilgiri Environment and Cultural Service Trust (NEST), said that authorities should have stopped the public bringing plastic containers, bottles and other non bio-degradable waste into the park, and instead, should have put up stalls selling food and other edibles in an eco-friendly manner.

“The toilets also became dirty very quickly and there were not enough of them for the sheer number of people who were visiting,” said Mr. Sivadas, who called for the duration of the flower show to be extended for around a month, in order to ensure that crowds become more manageable.

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