With hardly 48 hours left for the Makaravilakku festival, the holy hillock of Sabarimala and the foothills of Pampa witnessed a lean pilgrim inflow compared to the previous days.
Devotees are apprehensive over the chances of young women visiting the forest shrine in the last lap of the Makaravilakku festival season, inviting protests as earlier. The strengthened security at the holy hillock and its base camps at Pampa and Nilackal too appeared to have prompted many pilgrims to stay away from this year’s Makaravilakku festival.
The digital head count carried out by the police at the check-post at Pampa shows that only 44,100 persons have proceeded towards the Sannidhanam by 5 p.m. on Saturday. According to official sources, this is the lowest pilgrim count recorded at Pampa during the past one week.
Many parts of the Sannidhanam bore a more or less deserted look on Saturday evening as many pilgrims, especially those from outside Kerala, preferred not to stay back at the holy hillock in view of the violent protests against entry of women in the age group of 10 to 50 years to the Ayyappa temple during the past three months.
It is worth mentioning that the Sannidhanam, Pampa and Nilackal were overflowing with pilgrims during the same period in the previous year. Unlike in the past, only a few pilgrims were found camping at a Makarajyoti view point at Paandithavalom on Saturday evening.
The Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) has started cleaning the nine Makarayoti viewpoints at the Sannidhanam. The low water level in river Pampa has also put the pilgrims to difficulty for taking their customary holy dip.
An official announcement of the Kerala State Electricity Board says that 25,000 cubic metre of water would be released to the Pampa bathing ghats from the Kullar dam in view of the lean flow in the river during the last lap of the Makaravilakku festival.
The three-member monitoring committee appointed by the Kerala High Court, comprising P.R. Raman, S. Sirijagan, former High Court Judges, and A. Hemachandran, Additional Director General of Police, inspected the Nilackal base camp, Pampa and Sannidhanam on Friday and Saturday.
The panel noticed marked improvement in basic pilgrim facility at Nilackal, compared to the situation there during their previous visit.
