The Kila Raipur sports festival ran its 2026 edition from 17 to 19 February at Kila Raipur village in Ludhiana district.
The programme covers hockey, kabaddi, athletics and a range of traditional games, with boys and girls competing. The bullock cart races returned after a long absence. Racing had been stopped for roughly a decade under an animal cruelty ban, and Punjab's cabinet cleared a revival in 2019.
Circle-style kabaddi, played in a 22-metre mud circle with four stoppers per raid and about twelve to a side, is hosted by nearly all of Punjab's 12,500-plus villages, drawing crowds of 5,000 to 50,000. Annual tournament spending across the state runs to about ₹250 crore. Individual tournament budgets range from ₹10 to ₹50 lakh, and prizes include tractors, combine harvesters, Mahindra Thars and Harley-Davidsons.
Soni Singh of Bhadra in Mansa, a Dalit player, has won 18 to 20 motorbikes including a Harley and has played in New Zealand, Australia and England. Sandeep Nangal Ambia of Nangal Ambian in Shahkot, an anti-drug campaigner, was murdered in 2022 in a killing suspected to be linked to kabaddi rivalry.
It began in 1933 as a village sports day organised by Inder Singh Grewal and grew into a three day meet drawing lakhs of people.
The events are bullock cart racing, tractor and plough feats, tent pegging, kabaddi, athletics for older men, and a set of strength displays that have no formal category anywhere.
The diaspora comes back for it. It is the one event in the Punjabi year at which the village and its emigrants are in the same field at the same time.