Kanpur Dehat, which will see polling in phase 3 of the UP Assembly elections on Sunday, February 19, recently bore witness to a Guinness World Record created for the largest number of people carrying a banner. The feat was officially recognised by Guinness World Records on Thursday, Feb 16, for a pro-election banner which was about 3.5 km long and carried by 3,793 people.
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Arnab Chatterjee — the creative head of Allies Interactive — which created the banner at the direction of the Election Commission (EC) within a mere five days — told International Business Times, India, about the challenges his organisation faced, and how they overcame them to deliver a world record on behalf of the Kanpur Dehat district administration.
Challenges galore
"Our CEO Abdul Qaiyoom was approached by the EC with a mere five days in hand to create a banner that would be 3 km long. The most difficult part was creating such a banner on computer and then printing it out, and that too within such a short time," he said.
"What's more, we had to complete the design part within a single day, because printing the banner alone would take three-four days. However, we managed both phases and then the parts were hand-stitched into the 3-km-long banner that finally made it onto the streets," he told IBTimes India.
On the road
The previous record of this kind had been in Abu Dhabi in the UAE in November 2014, when 2,139 students had carried a banner. For the current record, 3,808 people had been recruited to carry the banner in Mati in Kanpur Dehat district, with a Guinness World Records judge from Mumbai in attendance.
However, 15 of those people could not finish the entire march, which was reportedly close to five hours, and the world record mentions about the remaining 3,793 people.
