The Hindu : National : It was a tragedy waiting to happen

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 27, 2005

National

National

It was a tragedy waiting to happen

By Arunkumar Bhatt

A shopkeeper sits amid the ruins of his gutted shop outside the Mandradevi temple at Wai, about 240 km south of Mumbai. About 300 people were killed in a stampede at the temple on Tuesday. — AP

WAI / PUNE, JAN. 26. Volunteers and police today continued to search for bodies at Mandhradevi Hills in Maharashtra, where about 300 people were killed in a stampede yesterday.

A highly placed police source in Satara told The Hindu over telephone that the total number of policemen on duty to manage more than three lakh devotees was just over 200.The arrangement did not include crowd control and guidance steps.

No lesson was learnt from the Nashik Kumbh Mela stampede of August 27, 2003 in which 39 devotees lost their lives. The authorities had spent hundreds of crores of rupees on the arrangements at Nashik, but had not provided separate routes for reaching the Godavari bank and returning from there.

The same was situation at Mandhradevi Hills. The one-km long track leading to the hilltop temple is narrow. The approach was made narrower by the 300 stalls selling pooja articles and prasad.

Also,there was no proper public communication system and guideposts along the route.

``Suddenly we heard an explosion and saw stalls aflame. Panic gripped the area and it led to the stampede,'' says 16-year-old Santosh Gaikwad, who was admitted to the Sasoon Hospital of Pune with a fracture. The stampede, fire, LPG explosionchanged the entire atmosphere.

Raju Pawar, a volunteer, said when word about the stampede spread, thousands of people on the downside of the slope, got worried about their relatives and tried to rush upward. The police prevented them from proceeding, which resulted in a clash.The enraged people set the stalls on fire a result. Subsequently gas cylinders in the stalls exploded.

Also there was no separate place for the devotees to break the coconuts. The steps were made slippery as hundreds of coconuts were broken.

``The same is the situation every year — lakhs of devotees, narrow approach, hundreds of stalls and meagre crowd control measures — so this was waiting to happen,'' said a doctor.

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