Allaiya Ballaiya

Thirty years ago, Vadodara's Navratri belonged entirely to grown-ups.

The garba grounds were loud, crowded, and built for adults — kids tagged along, stayed close to a parent, and mostly watched. In 1996, Ajai Pratap Dave set out to change that. He didn't want to make Navratri safer for children. He wanted to make it theirs.

That's how Allaiya Ballaiya began — at Panchshil School Ground in Manjalpur, with a simple idea that hadn't really been tried before in this city: a garba where the singers are children, the dancers are children, the costumes are children's choices, and the only rule for grown-ups is to stand back and watch the magic happen.

Thirty years later, that idea hasn't changed. What's changed is the scale of it. Every Navratri, somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000+ people walk through these gates over ten nights — not to watch a show, but to watch their own children become the show. Junior dancers age five to fifteen. Youth performers up through twenty-one. Mothers holding their under-five children's hands, getting their own pass just to stay close while the little ones take their first steps onto a garba floor that is entirely, deliberately, theirs.

2026 is our 30th edition. Three decades, ten nights each, thousands of small feet on one big ground — and every single child who has ever danced here carries a piece of Panchshil with them long after the lights come down.