At the Sunaseri meadow — also known locally as Guglidhar, tucked into the Pogal Paristan belt of Ramban district — last weekend brought something that meadow rarely sees outside of grazing season: a crowd, a stage, and two days of Pahari folk music echoing off the surrounding hills.
The festival ran 5-6 September, organised by the local community in partnership with the District Administration Ramban, the Directorate of Tourism J&K and the Academy of Art, Culture & Languages. It leaned entirely on what the belt already has plenty of: traditional Pahari folk music and dance, local art forms, rural sports competitions, camping under the open sky, and ethnic cuisine cooked the way it has been cooked in that valley for generations.
MLA Ramban Arjun Singh Raju inaugurated new tourism infrastructure at the site during the festival, alongside Deputy Commissioner Mohammad Alyas Khan, SSP Arun Gupta and SDM Sayed Mazahir Hussain Shah. That infrastructure — eco-log huts, viewpoints, benches, improved drainage and connected pathways — represents a ₹2.17 crore investment aimed squarely at turning Sunaseri from a scenic stopover into a destination people plan a trip around.
Why this matters beyond one weekend
Ramban’s stretch of the Jammu-Srinagar highway is mostly known to young Jammu travellers as the part of the drive you endure, not a place you stop. A meadow with proper huts, marked trails and an annual festival attached changes that calculus, particularly for anyone looking for a monsoon-season weekend trip that doesn’t mean fighting crowds at the more established hill stations. The MLA has committed to making this an annual post-monsoon fixture, explicitly framed as a way to grow Sunaseri’s profile as a rural and eco-tourism site and to keep Pahari cultural heritage visibly alive rather than confined to occasional government functions.
For now, Sunaseri has no formal booking infrastructure beyond what the festival showcased, so anyone planning a visit should check with the Ramban district tourism office for the current state of the eco-huts and access before setting out.
Source: Daily Excelsior.
