How eco-friendliness shapes the Ziro Festival of Music

After a two-year hiatus, Leegang Ania, a resident of Ziro town, is excited that the Ziro Festival of Music (ZFM) is returning to her little town this year at the end of September. Ania’s homestay in Biiri, the village closest to the festival grounds, is already booked. “Most of the homestays are already packed for the visitors. You might want to try your luck in the camping grounds,” she says. “And you must not use plastic and carry your own bottle of water that can be filled up,” she warns. 

As ZFM grew over the years, both residents and organisers worked closely and very hard to manage the waste and make the festival more sustainable. Although music festivals unite people with spellbinding live performances, they are also known for their massive carbon footprint. A recently conducted study calculated that one festival goer generates about five kilograms of carbon dioxide per day.

However, the ZFM organisers were years ahead of the authorities in bringing sustainable practices to reduce waste by banning single use plastic, which was banned nationally only in 2022. “The festival has sustainable and eco-friendly practices guidelines that have strengthened from year to year. We provide free water through our water stations and encourage everyone to bring their own reusable water bottles that they can fill up here; connected food stall owners to betel leaf cutlery manufacturers; and for decoration use upcycled cloth bunting, bamboo light fixtures and done away with fairy lights. We expect everyone associated with the festival, be it the crew, food stall owners, attendees to come on board with the festival’s ethos and help strengthen our commitment towards this. And we are continually adding to the guidelines as we ourselves learn more about sustainable practices,” says Lubna Shaheen, Programmes Director, Ziro Festival of Music.

The efforts of the festival organizers have been acknowledged and supported by the authorities from its inception. “Ziro Festival has shown a deep commitment towards sustainable practices since they began in 2012. They have built continuously upon the eco-friendly ethos seen in their use of traditional building materials for the festival infrastructure, involvement of the community, training youth, and employment of local artisans and thus contributing to the local economy. It is also notable that they banned single-use plastic several years ago and use recycled materials in their design aesthetics,” said Mama Natung, the Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Water Resources Department, Sports & Youth Affairs, Arunachal Pradesh.

The festival’s sustainable endeavours and for being one of the first green festivals in India have brought in corporate partnerships who want to support these green initiatives. According to Ruchira Jaitly, Vice President and Portfolio Head, Diageo, Ziro is a festival that truly walks the talk and is rightly called the greenest music festival in the country. “At Diageo, we strongly believe in collaborating with the right partners who stay true to what they believe in. As a brand, Signature stands for the belief that the best comes when we own who we are at our natural best, creating an individual, authentic and unique identity. It made sense to come on board as a green partner for the festival because we believe and we care, and are mindful of the impact that human beings make on the world around us. Ziro returns after 3 long years and we cannot wait to reconnect back with nature in the lush valleys of Arunachal Pradesh, and own our Signature at this unique festival,” Jaitly said.

Conserving traditions 

The townsfolk themselves have been running several campaigns annually to minimize the impact of pollution caused by waste. “We have been running the Clean Ziro, Green Ziro campaign through which we have ensured that camping sites in and around Ziro completely avoid single use plastic and water bottles. ZFM has been providing drinking water in the festival which allows the attendees to keep their own bottles filled up round-the-clock,” said Leegang Ania, who also is the Secretary of the local women committee that has been instrumental in organizing awareness about waste management and sustainable practices in Ziro. Ania also added that under the Clean Ziro, Green Ziro campaign the community has been cleaning up the local water bodies and rivers routinely.

Sustainable practices are an inalienable part of the Apatani society — the community that hosts ZFM every year. Wood from oak and pine, and bamboo are used extensively for construction. The community has a strong tradition of preserving forests by creating separate groves of bamboo and mixed forests mostly dominated by the indigenous oak. Every year in spring, the community collects saplings from the forested slopes surrounding the Ziro valley, and transplants them to these groves before using mature trees for construction.

The festival has borrowed similar ethos in preserving these practices since its inception in 2012 which employs close to 300 workers and artisans locally. The organizers encourage all the local food stalls within the festival ground to use traditional ways of serving food in cutlery made of natural materials like bamboo, local leaves, and banana stems. Like its previous editions, this year too, the festival organizers are using bamboo and locally available timber for construction. According to the festival’s architect for this year, Udit Mittal from QX Design, a firm based in Kolkata, who is building the festival space for this edition, the approach towards ZFM starts with understanding various aspects of the local architecture. “We have to understand the locally available bamboo which is pretty unique to Ziro valley. We went to villages nearby to understand how people work with bamboo and how their skill sets for using bamboo have evolved over the years. We improvise a lot on the site and take inputs of the workers and artisans,” Mittal adds. 

The festival site will be dominated by two stages, Signature Danyi (Sun i.e. day) and Simba Pwlo (Moon i.e. night). The night stage is shaped like a ten-pointed star, and will have a span of 50 feet. “The bamboo found here is not very structural so we need to support the structures with timber and pinewood. Most of the material used for construction of the stages are from the previous editions where the material is stored properly. Even the flattened bamboo called Yamio, which is weaved to make walls have been stored from the previous editions,” Mittal explains. Interestingly, the festival organizers also auction some parts of these structures and bamboo weaves which are used by the locals for construction. 

For building this edition of ZFM, Mittal and his team scourged the local scrap yards for metal waste that will be used for sitting arrangements and art installations. To build the structures, Mittal along with the local artisans are using fabric as joinery, while in places they have created a dome shaped which completely does away with joinery, simply by interlocking bamboo poles with each other using local architectural techniques. On the other hand, Kirti Jalan, Mittal’s partner has designed lights made out of the locally available bamboo.  

Since the past three editions, ZFM has been running a Sustainable Design Residence Workshop around the festival. “In the 2018 edition, the workshop participants created a children’s park, ‘Tumble Town’ entirely out of bamboo, where it was a joy to see adults playing alongside the kids,” says Shaheen. This year, Santiniketan-based artist, Dharitri Boro will be leading a participatory art project on tapestry weaving with plastic waste and create an installation with bamboo at ZFM as part of the workshop.

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