Recently the news of Supersonic shifting its venue from Goa to Pune has raised the concerns over the existence of the future of EDM festivals in the state of Goa. According to the sources, the Percept company who holds the Sunburn EDM festival in Goa has decided to leave the state and to shift its venue outside the Goa. What are their plans? read complete report here.
[su_expand more_text=”READ MORE” less_text=” ” height=”0″ hide_less=”yes” link_style=”button” link_align=”center”]According to the sources, one of the leading and pioneer EDM festival company Sunburn has finally decided to move its base out of Goa resulting into the situation that Sunburn 2016 may not take place in Goa this year. The internal sources in the company have revealed that the new venue will be announced soon. “A fresh venue and dates will be announced on Saturday and sale of tickets will begin on November 3,” chairman and managing director of Percept Limited Harindra Singh told TOI on Friday.
Earlier this month the Supersonic EDM Festival promoted by Nikhil Chinnapa who used to be a part of Sunburn from its inception and later moved out of it for starting his own company Supersonic. The company is funded by the Viacom 18 channel and after organizing the EDM festival for several years in the state, they had moved out of Goa announcing their new location as Pune.
Mr. Shailendra Singh, the CEO of the Sunburn company said that although he was looking forward to having the 10the edition of the EDM festival in Goa but since he did not receive any positive feedback from the government he decides to shift it outside the Goa. “We had submitted the application a few months back to the tourism department, seeking their permission to conduct the EDM festival in Goa from December 27-30, but, till date, we haven’t heard a word from the state government,” said Mr. Singh.
Sunburn’s Facebook page reads: “With months having passed since our application was filed for #Sunburn10 to be held in Goa; we still wait for an official response from the Goa government and local authorities. We have been waiting patiently for months for a clear direction to emerge, but unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. We did more than all we could!”
It may be recalled that the Goa government had decided to not to allow two EDMs simultaneously due to an issue with traffic conditions on the coastal belts of Goa. However, the Chief Minister and Tourism Minister later said that the government is open for the one EDM festival to be held in Goa in the last week of December but this was to be allowed provided the organizers pay off all their arrears, which according to the sources runs into several crores.
In the month of December 2015, the opposition had bounced on the ruling government for not collecting the revenue from the EDM organizers and allowing them to continuously organizing the festivals in the state. According to the sources, Singh clarified that they haven’t heard from the government and as such are unable to wait for any further as the work on setting up a venue has to be carried out at least six months in advance, and added that they would probably return to Goa in 2017 if the circumstances changed.
The sources have revealed that both the EDM organizers owe more than 2 crores in the form of taxes to the various government departments in Goa and this also included the bills raised by the Police department for providing the police security at the time of the festival. Although the organizers have alleged that the fees charged by the state police department are exorbitant compared to the other states in India. What probably worsened matter was that the state government, this year, hiked fees for mega tourism events with 10,000 plus audience, which chiefly include EDMs, from 1 crore to 5 crores, claimed the sources.
Source: Various Sources
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