Dehradun: Photographs of the tulip garden in Munsyari, a tourist hotspot, by Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat immediately went viral on Twitter and attracted a number of reactions, including from former Jammu and Kashmir CM Omar Abdullah.
Seeing the pictures of the tulip garden, Abdullah, in a tweet, said though the tulips being grown in the backdrop of the Panchachuli range are beautiful but they are not as beautiful as Srinagar’s tulip garden.
However, Rawat did not respond to the tweet.
Rawat had on Saturday shared on Twitter a few pictures of the tulip garden along with a post.
“I am very happy to share the first pictures of the successful pilot project of a tulip garden in Munsyari — my dream project. Set against the backdrop of the Panchachuli range this is one of the world’s largest tulip gardens which will bring about a major change in tourism in Munsyari area,” he tweeted while sharing the pictures.
“A part of ‘Munsyari Nature Education and Eco Park Centre’ is being developed as the tulip garden and it is different from the tulip garden being developed in Pithoragarh. There are tents, apart from huts, in the park where people can stay,” Rawat wrote.
Without a hint of bias CM Sahib let me say that although the backdrop here is very pretty the Tulip garden in Srinagar is much prettier & from these photographs looks considerably bigger but this one is nice too. Congratulations 😊 https://t.co/YNPQCxY7x4
— Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) May 9, 2020
The pilot project has been developed over an area of 1,200 square metres. Around 7,000 tulip bulbs were brought from Holland for the project and all of them budded forth, divisional forest officer, Pithoragarh, Vinay Bhargava said.
Former cabinet minister and local MLA Prakash Pant was the first to come up with the idea. But after his death in June last year, Bhargava gave a presentation on the project before the chief minister, which he approved.
“Our effort is to expand the project and also grow a variety of flowers as part of it, including iris, lilium and daffodils,” he said.
The project is to be developed in such a manner that apart from giving tourism a boost, it also generates employment for locals, Bhargava said.
“We will try to produce our own tulip bulbs so that we can save the recurring cost on buying bulbs from outside,” he said.
