AT LEAST 16 people, 14 of them women, were crushed to death in a stampede yesterday during a Hindu religious ceremony on the banks of the Ganges river in northern India, officials said.
The incident, in which another 50 people were injured, many seriously, occurred at Haridwar in Uttrakhand province, 200km north of New Delhi. A scrum of pilgrims tripped and fell as thousands of Hindu devotees crowded round a fire at an ashram to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founder’s birth.
“When the ritual was in progress, far too many people rushed forward to make their offerings and when a couple of people slipped . . . panic spread and the stampede occurred,” said Hemant Sahu, spokesman for the five-day event, which takes place once every 12 years.
District magistrate Santhel Pandiyan said more worshippers had turned up than the location could accommodate, resulting in the chaos. The local administration has ordered a magistrate’s inquiry.
Millions of Hindu pilgrims visit Haridwar each year to bathe in the Ganges, which they consider holy, believing it will cleanse them of sins and free their soul from the endless cycle of life and rebirth, helping them to attain nirvana.
Stampedes are a frequent occurrence across India at similar events in temples and religious sites, where crowd control measures are often inadequate to manage vast multitudes – despite the apparent danger.
In January in southern Kerala state, more than 100 people died after worshippers panicked while traversing a narrow mountainous path at night to a Hindu shrine.
Last March, police in Uttar Pradesh province blamed lax safety for the deaths of 63 people – all of them women and children – in a melee outside another Hindu temple triggered by a mad scramble for free food, clothes and utensils.
In 2008 at least 145 people, mostly women and infants, were killed amid a massive crowd at a popular temple site in the Himalayas in the north. Later that year 220 people died the same way at a small Hindu temple inside a medieval fort in western Rajasthan province.