About the Institution
REACH is not a festival. It is the institutional infrastructure that ensures India's living cultural heritage has a permanent, prestigious, and sustained platform — generation after generation.
"An institution does not measure its worth by a single event. It measures it by what persists after the event ends."
REACH — Rural Entrepreneurship for Art and Cultural Heritage — was established in 1995 in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. It was born from a specific observation: that the accelerating homogenisation of media and culture was systematically erasing the specific, the regional, and the indigenous in favour of the generic and the broadly commercial.
The founding response was not an archive. It was a platform — a stage, a gathering, a sustained annual assertion that India's folk and classical traditions deserve not just documentation but active, living practice. The Virasat Festival became that platform. Thirty editions later, it remains the oldest continually running heritage festival of its kind in Dehradun.
But REACH is more than Virasat. Over three decades, the institution has expanded into theatre, cinema, knowledge and dialogue, youth education, and now digital heritage preservation. Each initiative is distinct. Each shares a founding conviction: that culture is not a relic to be preserved — it is a living force to be practised, celebrated, and passed on.
In 1995, this was not an abstract concern. It was a visible, measurable cultural erosion — and REACH was founded as a direct institutional response.
Mass media was creating a global village.
Cultural angularities were fading.
Local arts and identities were losing space in mainstream narratives.
Regional voices found fewer platforms. Indigenous art forms were being flattened into the generic.
Celebrate indigenous art forms — not as curiosities, but as living, practised traditions.
Respect local traditions by giving them the most prestigious platform available.
Create platforms for regional voices that the mainstream had stopped making room for.
Preserve the cultural gene pool — from folk forms to classical traditions — in active practice.
Year of Founding
"To explore the common linkages among various cultures of the world, to foster better understanding among nations for world peace and sustainability."
— REACH founding mission statement
REACH was founded by a group of cultural practitioners in Dehradun who believed that the Himalayan foothills — one of India's most culturally rich regions, home to Garhwali and Kumaoni traditions, a crossroads of classical and folk heritage — deserved a permanent cultural institution that matched the depth of what was being preserved.
The instrument they chose was a festival. Not because a festival is the simplest form — it is, in fact, one of the most demanding — but because a festival brings living practitioners onto a living stage in front of a living audience. It is the opposite of archival preservation. It is cultural practice in real time.
The Virasat Festival debuted in 1995. ONGC, recognising the institutional significance of what REACH was attempting, stepped forward as the principal sponsor — a partnership that has held without interruption across every single one of the thirty editions that followed. That continuity of sponsorship is itself a form of cultural validation.
In the years that followed, Virasat grew from a regional gathering to a nationally recognised cultural event, drawing artists from over fifteen countries, engaging forty-plus schools annually, and drawing audiences of millions across its sixteen-day run. But REACH's founders understood early that a festival, however successful, is insufficient institutional infrastructure on its own.
Culture requires year-round attention. It requires theatre. It requires cinema. It requires intellectual exchange. It requires the education of the next generation of practitioners and patrons. And now, in the digital age, it requires permanent online documentation that is as rigorous and as beautiful as the traditions it seeks to honour.
Each of these recognitions has produced a new REACH initiative. Together, they constitute the institution that REACH has become over thirty years — not by design from the outset, but by the organic logic of cultural custodianship taken seriously.
Founding Member & General Secretary · Founding Member
RK Singh has been the institutional backbone of REACH since its founding in 1995. As General Secretary, he has stewarded the organisation through thirty editions of the Virasat Festival, the development of REACH Talkies, the launch of Rangmanch, and the current digital expansion. Under his leadership, REACH has received recognition from the Prime Minister of India, successive Governors of Uttarakhand, and the Ministry of Culture.
Founding Member & General Secretary · Founding Member
RK Singh has been the institutional backbone of REACH since its founding in 1995. As General Secretary, he has stewarded the organisation through thirty editions of the Virasat Festival, the development of REACH Talkies, the launch of Rangmanch, and the current digital expansion. Under his leadership, REACH has received recognition from the Prime Minister of India, successive Governors of Uttarakhand, and the Ministry of Culture.
"Preserve the cultural gene pool..."
The founding mission of REACH · 1995 · Dehradun