Nuakhai is an agricultural festival mainly observed by people of Western Odisha in India. Nuakhai is observed to welcome the new rice of the season. According to the calendar it is observed on panchami tithi (the fifth day) of the lunar fortnight of the month of Bhadrapada or Bhadraba (August–September), the day after the Ganesh Chaturthi festival. This is the most important social festival of Western Odisha and Chhattishgarh also adjoining areas of Simdega in Jharkhand, where the culture of Western Odisha is much predominant.
Nuakhai is an agricultural festival mainly observed by people of Western Odisha in India. Nuakhai is observed to welcome the new rice of the season. According to the calendar it is observed on panchami tithi (the fifth day) of the lunar fortnight of the month of Bhadrapada or Bhadraba (August–September), the day after the Ganesh Chaturthi festival. This is the most important social festival of Western Odisha and Chhattishgarh also adjoining areas of Simdega in Jharkhand, where the culture of Western Odisha is much predominant.
==Description== Nuakhai is also called Nuakhai Parab or Nuakhai Bhetghat. It is also known as Navakhai Parv in Chhattisgarh. The word nua means new and khai means food, so the name means the farmers are in possession of the newly harvested rice. The festival is seen as a new ray of hope, held the day after the Ganesh Chaturthi festival. It has a big significance for farmers and the agricultural community. The festival celebrated at a particular time of day which is called lagan. Aersaa Pithaa is prepared to celebrate this festival. When the lagan comes, the people first remember their village god or goddess and then have their khai.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).