LAHORE: The Parks and Horticulture Authority has decided to stage a Basant Festival in Lahore that will use flowers, kites and cultural colour to showcase the city, with entry and exit routes to be dressed in welcome banners and special lighting.
A key meeting on festival preparations was chaired by Punjab Housing Minister Bilal Yasin, at which PHA Director General Ahmad Usman Javed briefed participants on the arrangements.
The meeting sought proposals for a grand cultural mela steeped in the colours of Basant. Bilal Yasin said Lahore’s arterial roads would be lit up with colourful decoration, special floats and cultural displays.
The minister said the city’s entry and exit points would be decorated with welcome banners and special lighting, and that the culture and traditional colours of historic Lahore would form a prominent part of the festival’s identity.
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Special floats and cultural programmes will be presented at different points across the city, Bilal Yasin said. The festival will also feature dedicated khabba stalls serving traditional dishes and Lahori flavours — a nod to the food culture that has always run alongside the kite flying rather than behind it.
Well-known musicians and performers will play at the festival, the minister added, saying the intention was to stir the blood of the zinda dilan-e-Lahore and make the event a memorable one.
The PHA’s role places the visual identity of Basant under a single civic authority, which is a meaningful change from the pre-ban era when decoration was largely private, uncoordinated and concentrated in a handful of neighbourhoods. Routing it through the authority allows the province to distribute the festival’s visible footprint across the city rather than let it cluster in the Walled City and a few affluent enclaves.
It also gives the administration a lever it did not previously have. Decoration budgets, float routes and stage locations can be used to steer crowds towards managed spaces and away from rooftops and narrow lanes, where the safety risk has always been concentrated.
The festival planning is proceeding alongside the regulatory work being handled by the district administration, police and allied departments, which is dealing with licensing, permitted kite and twine sizes, and enforcement against chemical-coated string.
The PHA’s brief is the celebratory face of Basant. The enforcement brief sits elsewhere. Officials have indicated that the two tracks are being sequenced so that the decoration and cultural programming are locked in only once the safety framework is settled.
Basant remains the largest scheduled local event on Lahore’s calendar, and both the cultural and enforcement arms of the provincial government are treating it as a test of whether a regulated festival can be delivered at scale.
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