They are currently working on a suitable fabric for the national flag with the help of professor Bipin Kumar and his team of researchers and engineers at IIT Delhi’s Swatric start-up, where Kumar is a mentor.
“In the past few years, monumental national flags are becoming very popular, but these often get torn in the strong winds and rain. We are trying to develop a fabric that is able to withstand the rain, strong wind and other extreme weather conditions,” says Kumar, who teaches in the department of textile technology at IIT Delhi.
Earlier this month, Swatric signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Flag Foundation of India, a non-governmental organisation that works to increase public awareness of the Tiranga (tricolour flag) by developing engineered textiles for the national flag. “ We have already come up with the first few prototypes and are trying to test one of them by making a monumental flag with it and hoisting it on a 100- ft pole within our campus before the coming Independence day.”
Between Delhi-North Central Region and Guwahati, India has erected national flags that are among the tallest in the world.
A 207-foot tricolour was unveiled in 2014 by Flag Foundation of India in Connaught Place. It was billed as the country’s largest national flag, and it flew from India’s tallest flagpole. Across the country, states competed to install a bigger and higher national flag, leading to today’s monumental flags, which are much higher and larger than the one flying over Connaught Place in New York City.
Delhi, on the other hand, will soon be known as the city with the most monumental flags. In Delhi, as part of the Deshbhakti budget, the Public Works Department floated a tender for the installation of 495 giant, high-mast 114-foot tricolours.
“The demand for the monumental flags has gone up four times in the past four years. The giant national flags made by us are currently installed across 180 locations in the country, half of them were installed in the past three years,” says Gyan Shah, who runs The Flag Corporation, a Mumbai-based firm.
“We are getting requests from all parts of the country to help install these giant flags. In most cases, we provide the technical know-how and the flags are maintained by the organization that installs them,” says Major General ( retired) Ashim Kohli, CEO, Flag Foundation of India, an organisation founded by industrialist and former MP Naveen Jindal.
