Shas­tri Boodan

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

The Na­tion­al Ram­leela Coun­cil of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NRCTT) is call­ing for $1 mil­lion to stage this year’s cel­e­bra­tions. The an­nounce­ment was made by NRCTT pres­i­dent Dhi­raj Ramkissoon, fol­low­ing the launch of the 2025 fes­tiv­i­ties on Sun­day at the Cou­va Point Lisas Cham­ber of Com­merce, Cam­den, Cou­va.

Ramkissoon lament­ed that Ram­leela had been treat­ed as “a bas­tard child” by the State for decades, re­ceiv­ing lit­tle fund­ing and scant recog­ni­tion. He not­ed that in 2024, the gov­ern­ment pro­vid­ed no fi­nan­cial sup­port for 17 groups un­der the NRCTT um­brel­la, claim­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion for fund­ing had been sub­mit­ted too late. How­ev­er, the group re­ceived $100,000 for 2023 cel­e­bra­tions long af­ter the event passed.

He ex­plained that the NRCTT wrote to new Min­is­ter of Cul­ture, Michelle Ben­jamin, on June 8th and was still await­ing a re­sponse to se­cure a meet­ing to dis­cuss Car­ifes­ta 2025 and the fu­ture of the art form.

Ramkissoon al­so ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment that Ram­leela was ex­clud­ed from this year’s Car­ifes­ta pro­gramme.

“In 2019, when T&T host­ed Car­ifes­ta, Ram­leela was part of the cel­e­bra­tions. This year, the theme for Car­ifes­ta was Her­itage. Ram­leela was ex­clud­ed, so it seems as though the In­di­an tra­di­tions are not con­sid­ered part of our her­itage. There are two eth­nic groups that came to T&T to work, stayed here and built this na­tion, and it is sad to say that Ram­leela is not recog­nised as part of that,” he said.

Ramkissoon added that sup­port from the pri­vate sec­tor was gen­er­al­ly lim­it­ed to busi­ness­es lo­cat­ed in ar­eas where cel­e­bra­tions were staged. He stressed that the NRCTT re­ceived no fund­ing from com­pa­nies on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate, nor from state agen­cies that fi­nanced oth­er cul­tur­al ac­tiv­i­ties.

He con­firmed that this year’s Ram­leela cel­e­bra­tions would com­mence in Sep­tem­ber and run for a month at var­i­ous venues across Trinidad, giv­ing peo­ple the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­pe­ri­ence the tra­di­tion na­tion­wide.