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No money but show must go on

5 December 2008

The Citizen’s Initiative for Centenary and Coronation Celebrations (CICCC) is just halfway through and the organisers have a deficit of Nu 5.0 million. They had a fund commitment of Nu 19 million while they ended up spending Nu 24 million.

The organisers say that at least Nu 17 million was spent on building the infrastructure visible at the centenary ground in Thimphu. The expenditure on six musical events will be borne by the CICCC as no sponsors were found for these. A nominal fee was collected from two of the shows. One more show will be charged while three others are free.

“We spent Nu 1.6 million on the Thai bands and Nu 2.4 million for the Unity in Diversity show,” said Dorji Wangchuk, one of the Directors of the CICCC.

He said that the CICCC took a loan of Nu 3.0 million to kickstart the project. “Later, I took an additional Nu 1.0 million loan and so did Tshering Gyeltshen, one of the three organising partners.”

The deficit arose because the CICCC had set a fund raising target of Nu 38 million that could not be met. “The Bangladesh trade show contributed to a Nu 1.5 million deficit,” said Dorji Wangchuk. “It was a total failure.”

From the 67 Bangladesh exhibitors registered with the CICCC, only six turned up. The rest withdrew three days before the exhibition.

The CICCC had promised the government and the people that they would be observe 42 days of celebration with 127 activities and about 600 song, dance and entertainment items.

“The promises will be delivered,” said Dorji Wangchuk. He claimed that, even with the deficit, none of the programmes would be cancelled.

The programme coordinators employed for programmes which is finished are still retained till the end of the celebration. Withdrawing is out of question because the organisers plan to put up a proposal to extend the celebration until the end of the year.

The directors of the CICCC answered the million-dollar question of how they are going to survive until the end. They said that the three of them who organised the event have signed an agreement among themselves that loss incurred would be shared equally between them and that no one will back out at any point of time.

They are continuing with marketing and fund raising efforts.

Their current sponsors are state corporations, private sector companies and the government. They also received institutional support for public awareness campaigns from relevant international and government organisations.

“The government gave us Nu 2.0 million as seed money and we have been supported in terms of power, water, garbage collection, tax exemption for everything we bought and tax exemptions for sponsors who have sent us money,” said Dorji Wangchuk. “This is a true government-private partnership.”

By Tandin Pem

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Comments

One Response to “No money but show must go on”

  1. Sadcase on December 6th, 2008 3:33 pm

    This is a clear message to the organizers. How Rich is Bhutan? and the fact they are camped near the river will not help, As River Banks don’t usually give loans to strangers.

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