Mumbai: The ten-day long Ganesh festival kicked off with zeal and fervour across Maharashtra Thursday. The festival began with devotees, mostly attired in traditional clothes, bringing colourfully-crafted idols of the elephant-headed God in their homes and pandals and installing them amid chants of 'Ganapati bappa moraya', beating of drums and and sprinkling of 'gulal' (red coloured powder).
Several beautifully decked up pandals have been erected in all major cities and towns in the state, including Mumbai, Pune, Nashik and Nagpur, where huge idols of Lord Ganesha have been placed on raised platforms for people to worship.
These makeshift tents also serve as a venue for promoting social causes such as free medical checkup, blood donation camps, charity for poor during the festival days. CM Devendra Fadnavis and his cabinet colleagues Pankaja Munde and Vinod Tawde, Union minister Nitin Gadkari, state minister Sadabhau Khot, former Union Home minister Sushilkumar Shinde and Shiv Sena leader Manohar Joshi were prominent among those who installed Ganpati idols at their homes.