Applications have risen from 2,500 to roughly 4,000 in a week, but 14 days after the Basant Portal opened no manufacturer has a licence — and none may legally cut a single sheet of paper until one arrives.
LAHORE: Fourteen days after Lahore Administration opened its Basant Portal to kite and string manufacturers, not one licence has been issued, leaving roughly 4,000 applicants unable to begin production for a festival scheduled for March 12 to 14, 2027.
The district administration says verification is continuing under Assistant Commissioners, with Additional Assistant Commissioners and enforcement personnel conducting field checks, and that licences will follow once the Punjab government grants approval.
Manufacturers say the six-month head start the province advertised is being consumed by paperwork, while the District Kite Flying Association warns that a repeat of the shortages seen at Basant 2026 is now a live risk.
The Punjab government’s central argument for opening manufacturing six months before Basant was that lead time would prevent the shortages and price spikes of the previous festival. Two weeks into the process, that argument is being tested. Applications have climbed from more than 2,500 on day eight, as The Lahore Times reported, to roughly 4,000 now, and the number of licences issued has not moved from zero. Workshops remain idle at the point in the calendar when they should be building stock.
Registration opened on the Basant Portal on September 5, a window roughly six times longer than the month applicants had before Basant 2026. The sequence is fixed in which a licence and the accompanying No Objection Certificate (NOC) must be in hand before production may begin, and only at the premises named in the application. The administration withdrew its earlier proposal to confine production to five designated zones days before the portal opened, so the licence rather than the location is now the deciding factor.
Officials say the machinery is moving. On September 12 Deputy Commissioner Captain (retd) Muhammad Ali Ijaz directed that verification be accelerated, saying all Assistant Commissioners had been mobilised for field verification of manufacturers and instructing them to complete scrutiny of credentials and inspection of premises promptly. Licences, he said, would go only to manufacturers meeting every legal requirement and prescribed standard. A district administration spokesperson said on Sunday that verification was continuing under Assistant Commissioners, with Additional Assistant Commissioners and field enforcement personnel carrying out checks, and that issuance would begin once the Punjab government granted permission.
Those two accounts do not quite align, and the gap matters to applicants. One places the bottleneck in field verification, which the district can accelerate on its own; the other places it in a provincial clearance the district does not control. Neither the deputy commissioner’s office nor the spokesperson has given a target date for the first licence, a count of verifications completed, or the number of applications rejected.
The process has been opaque in practice. One applicant told The Lahore Times he received a call from the deputy commissioner’s office asking for a fresh photograph and his address, was told only that verification was under way, and found his application marked as resubmitted after the call ended. “What is the scene?” he asked. The complaint is less about scrutiny than about the absence of a status anyone can read. Trust was already thin as in the previous cycle, manufacturers said licensed stock was seized anyway and that intermediaries charged as much as Rs100 simply to enter a name on the portal. The administration has answered with a portal inventory feature allowing manufacturers to log output as it happens so official records tally with a trader’s own, alongside a complaints mechanism and a control room.
The District Kite Flying Association has been pressing this case since August. At a press conference in Allama Iqbal Town, Chairman Khawaja Nadeem Saeed Wain, President Sheikh Saleem and other office-bearers called for manufacturers’ licences to be reissued and for the kite-flying trade to be placed on a permanent legal footing rather than revived festival by festival.
Wain said manufacturing should be permitted across Punjab for four to five months from September, arguing that manufacturers need at least four months to build adequate stock, and that if the festival has been announced, permission to manufacture should follow. He linked the demand directly to Basant 2026, when buyers struggled to find kites and string because manufacturers had too little time. The association has also pushed for safety measures aimed specifically at children.
The controls exist for a reason the city remembers. Kite flying was banned in Lahore for 18 years after metal- and chemical-coated string killed motorcyclists and pedestrians and brought down power lines. The festival returned from February 6 to 8, 2026 under the Punjab Regulation of Kite Flying Act, 2025, passed by the Punjab Assembly in December 2025 and treated by the authorities as a pilot; 17 people died during that festival, according to figures the Home Department supplied to the Lahore High Court (LHC). Only approved kite sizes are permitted, with cotton string and panna allowed for flying and a stated zero-tolerance approach to chemical-coated string and metallic wire.
Enforcement against the unlicensed trade has not paused while the licensed trade waits. Police have kept up seizures through the month, including a Dolphin Squad operation in which 70 kite sellers were detained with chemical string, and arrests of suppliers have continued in Mughalpura, Islampura, Ravi Road and elsewhere. Preparations on the festival side are further along than the licensing.
Senior Minister Maryam Aurangzeb chaired a meeting on the portal’s launch, Housing Minister Bilal Yasin has reviewed arrangements with a briefing from the deputy commissioner, and the Parks and Horticulture Authority is planning a programme of floats, food and music alongside the decoration of major roads, flyovers and entry points for the March 12 to 14 festival. Registration for kite sellers, traders and associations is expected to open only in January or February.
The arithmetic is what worries the trade. If the first licences arrive in October, manufacturers still have roughly five months of production, close to what the association says it needs. Every further week of silence eats into that margin and pushes the province back towards the compressed, shortage-prone cycle the early start was designed to avoid.
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