Ahmedabad: Gujarat University (GU) has announced its annual Youth Festival will be held in Sep, offering students a platform to showcase their artistic, cultural, creative and intellectual talents.The festival is organised at the inter-departmental and inter-collegiate levels, drawing participation from affiliated colleges. Students compete in disciplines such as literature, music, dance, theatre, and fine arts, among others. The festival aims to preserve cultural heritage while fostering creativity and personality development among students.To strengthen the event, the university has increased financial assistance for the host college. The grant has been raised from Rs 6.5 lakh to Rs 7 lakh, underlining the university’s focus on improving the scale and quality of the festival.This year’s edition will introduce new competitions, including mono acting, poetry recitation and Paad-Poorti (creative completion). The additions are expected to provide students with greater opportunities to display their acting, literary, linguistic, and creative skills.The university has also revamped its oratory competitions to align them with formats followed by the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) at the national level. Earlier, speech and discussion events were conducted in multiple languages under common categories. From this year, language-specific competitions will be held, including Vaktrutva (Gujarati), Elocution (English), Vagmita (Hindi), Debate (English), Vad-Vivad (Hindi) and Charcha (Gujarati).University officials said the changes will help students communicate more effectively in their preferred language and better prepare them for national-level contests.
