Cutting Edge - Ahmedabad's Kite Festival

The beautiful images conjured in Khaled Hosseini's ' The kite runner' shift context in today's Ahmedabad . Stacks of kites and festival merchandise stockpiled for the big day have all but gone, providing a welcome boost to the livelihoods of local merchants , kitemakers and manja wallah's who struggle to keep the kitemaking tradition viable in the face of shifting economic and social opportunities.

As thursday's Uttarayan festival reached it's climax , the Times of India newspaper reported on a the impacts of festive kite flying celebrations across the state of Gudjarat. Over recent years growing concerns have emerged about the impact from deadly 'manja', the kite flying cord responsible for the death of increasing numbers of people and birds as they cut across the bodies of unwitting victims. Treated with a brightly coloured coating of sharp glass powder to cut cords of competing kites during the jubilant flying frenzy, kite manja interrupts the flight of local and migratory birds and drifts across the bodies of kite flyers, pedestrians, motor cycle and bicycle riders. The entanglement of kite strings has led to electrocutions as it becomes entangled in overhead electrical cable, trees and buildings. Children also become victims of accidents caused by impacting vehicles or falling from terraces as they chase drifting kites along the streets and rooftops, and an weblike tangle of waste nets the city. A total of 657 birds and 250 people are reported injured during the festivities, including 4 human and an unknown number of bird deaths.

The Uttarayan festival reflects the classic complexities of a Horst Rittel 'wicked problem' , where the problems and solutions are closely interlinked, and may be difficult to define in absolute terms. Indeed there may be no absolute solution. For design this presents a challenge to ameliorate the unacceptable impacts of kite flying without killing off the fun and the fragile economy of the festival; to achieve a beneficial balance of cultural, economic and environmental concerns.