This is not the first time NGOs and social activists have been keen on restricting celebrations of festivals in India. Deepavali and Holi are the best examples of how NGOs have played with the sentiments of common people by considering the celebration to be hazardous to environment. Adding to that list now is International Women's Day.
A Bangalore based NGO, which has refused to disclose details about it, has filed a case against Women's Day celebration in India. Though NGO has tried to maintain the case secretly until the ban is completely implemented, the leader of Feminist India Association, has filed RTI against the case and got the necessary information regarding the case.
The case statement provided by the NGO states that, "India needs to constraint the way it celebrates festivals. There is a festival everyday in one or more parts of the country and every single festival, which India claims to be its tradition causes environmental hazard. Though adapted from Western countries, Women's Day celebration in India is still vile and more hazardous than any other festival.
Plastic covers that are used to wrap the flowers and bouquet, are discarded at the time of acceptance of the flowers, or the bouquet as a whole is disposed improperly. This causes huge environmental hazard by means of soil pollution and water pollution. It is also found out that the deep sea creatures confuse between jelly fish and polythene flower wrapper, which has been the reason for extinction of a rare species in Antartic Ocean.
Last year, when we had approached the High Court, they had cancelled our petition, the reason being there is no strong evidence to prove our fact. With one year of hard-work with the support from Barbados University, we had come up with the statistical details of how much exactly is the impact of wrapping plastics to the environment.
With these evidences we expect the jury to take necessary action under Environment Protection Act, 1986 to ban the celebration of Women's Day as a whole in India".
On further enquiry with Court and police officials, it is found that the Court has not accepted the petition on complete ban on Women's Day in India as it would restrict 50 percent of the population to enjoy their Right to Freedom. However, considering the impact, which is said to be 220000 kg of plastic disposal on this day every year (too huge and constitutes to 23 percent of global plastic disposal throughout the year) the Court is considering the case to be valid and taking necessary actions to make restrictions on the celebration of the festival in India.
With more and more NGOs funded by other countries keep emerging and restricting Indians from celebrating festivals, it is an irony today to still call India as a country of festivals.
