The hill temple of Lord Venkateswara witnessed a sea of humanity on December 29 with unprecedented crowds thronging the town on the auspicious ‘Vaikunta Ekadasi’. All the arrangements crumbled as the town burst at its seams with the arrival of thousands of pilgrims.
Apparently pilgrims were subjected to untold sufferings. The “paucity” in the supply of food and water sachets was distinctly felt. The additional washrooms constructed by the TTD in anticipation of heavy crowd also proved inadequate, and the pilgrims were forced to spend long hours to relieve themselves. Several of the devotees reportedly took ill unable to withstand the ordeal in the darshan queues, braving the biting cold, even as the waiting time stretched beyond 24 hours.
All the 55 queue compartments at both the massive Vaikuntam complexes, that can jointly house about 30,000 devotees in a single sitting, were full to their capacity. In addition to this, the 16 sheds constructed temporarily at the sprawling Narayanagiri gardens with a handling capacity of about 2,500 pilgrims each were full by Thursday afternoon (December 28) and the darshan lines spilled to couple of kilometres on to the outer ring road after circumnavigating through the thoroughfares of the town.
Sevas suspended
Anticipating a heavy turnout, the TTD had dispensed with all kinds of Arjitha sevas inside the temple, suspended the exclusive darshan privileges being extended to senior citizens and privileged citizens, people with infants, pilgrims reaching on foot and the sale of ₹300 darshan tickets. As a precautionary measure, a three-and-half-km stretch of darshan queue was set up outside the massive Vaikuntam complex, which the officials thought would act as a cushion in the event of surge in pilgrims.
Things went awry and the management groaned under the pressure of unrelenting crowds, which according to reports, was more than 30% higher when compared to previous year.
The problem
While the officials attributed the rush to the year-end holidays coinciding with the festival, the permission granted to pilgrims to enter the Vaikuntam complex on the previous day itself for the Ekadasi darshan, is being cited as the main reason for crowding.
Had the pilgrims not been permitted to assemble so early, they would have stayed back in their cottages instead of being stranded on the roads. This would have helped the TTD in regulating the crowds. The oft-repeated proclamations that more than 40 hours would be allotted to common pilgrims in the darshan of the deity is also learnt to have contributed in the abnormal increase in the crowd.
Meanwhile, officials strongly felt it is time the TTD management either went in for the total implementation of ‘time slot’ system or replicate the system at the Vaishno Devi shrine and permit only a definite number of devotees to reach the hill shrine from Tirupati every day to prevent recurrence of chaotic situation in the future.
