Mumbai celebrates mango festival

Mumbai, May 10: Come summer and Mango season dawns in India with many people bracing up to demonstrate their prowess at eating mangoes, known as the king of fruits. At a competition in Mumbai, which was a part of the six-day Konkan Festival that started on May 6 and will end on May 12, men, women and children competed with one another in demonstrating their skills in eating mangoes as fast as possible.

Around 30 people participated in the 3 minutes competition. The participants had to eat maximum number of mangoes in the provided time slot. "We had decided to eat maximum mangoes. I used to eat 5-8 mangoes every day. But today, I ate 15 mangoes," said Dashrath Kadam, Winner. A box full of mangoes was given as prize to each of the winners in the three categories of men, women and children.

The annual mango eating competition, 6th in succession, was organised by Konkan Vikas Pratishthan (Konkan Development Organisation) to promote the Alphanso varieties of mangoes for which the Konkan region in Maharashtra is famous.

"We organised this competition to popularise the Konkan mango so that the farmers can sell these mangoes on a large scale.

These farmers have come all the way travelling 500 km to sell their mangoes here," said Rajendra Tawde, Secretary, Konkan Vikas Pratishthan.

ANI