Swarm of crowds of devotees bathed in rivers at the Maha Kumbh Mela Festival of India on Thursday, without being made of a stampede one day before he killed at least 30 people.
The Kumbh Mela attracts dozens of millions of Hindu faithful throughout India every 12 years to the northern city of Prayagraj, but has an unfortunate history of mortal incidents of the crowd.
The disaster prior to dawn, which saw a growing spilled crowd from a police cord and trampling the spectators, led some frightened pilgrims to leave the festival. Police said that 30 people died in love and 90 were injured, but Fuentes said Reuters The death toll was almost 40.
But many more were arriving after the stampede to participate in what they said it was a matter of religious obligation.
“We have obviously heard about the stampede,” Pradhan, 21, told Naveen Naveen AFP.
“But this is something holy, something religious, something we should do like Hindus, and my family would not have lost this no matter what.”
Kumbh Mela of six weeks is the greatest milestone in the Hindu religious calendar, and on Wednesday he marked one of the most sacred days of the festival, coinciding with an alignment of the planets of the Solar System.
Despite the early disaster in the morning, the holy men dressed in saffron continued with the rituals of the day later, taking millions to a cleaning bath for the sin for the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers.
“The trip was a challenge: the trains were full, the train stations were full,” Padmabati Dam, who traveled by train for more than 1,000 kilometers to reach the festival, told the pharmacist, said AFP.
“We were tired after a trip as long, but as soon as we immerse ourselves in the river, we feel so fresh and happy. It was as if all that inconvenience was really worth it. ”
Ordered probe
Indian authorities have ordered stampede investigation. Police said that 30 people died in the falling in the world’s largest humanity meeting and 90 were injured, but Fuentes said Reuters The death toll was almost 40.
Some witnesses talked about a great thrust to the rivers that caused the devotees to fall together, while others said that the closure of water routes put the dense crowd to a dead point and made people collapse due to suffocation .
“The government has decided that a judicial investigation of the incident will be carried out. For this, we have formed a Judicial Commission of three members, ”said Pradesh Yogi Adityanath Yogi on Wednesday night, Wednesday night.
“The Judicial Commission will analyze the entire issue and present its report to the state government within a time limit,” he said.
More than 76 million people immersed themselves in the confluence of three sacred rivers in Prayagraj in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh until 8 pm (7:30 PM PKT) Only on Wednesday, authorities said.
The opposition leaders have blamed the stampede of poor management and urged the government to improve festival arrangements, while local media said Thursday that better multitude planning was needed to avoid such incidents.
“There is a lot of margin to improve the management of the crowd in the kumbh”, the Hindustan Times The newspaper said in an editorial.
“There is no doubt that more personnel should be deployed, and better planning is needed, using land resources and modern technology,” he said, adding that a repetition of the tragedy must be prevented in the three “real falls” scheduled in the coming weeks .
Mythological battle
The Kumbh Mela is rooted in a mythological Hindu between deities and demons for the control of a pitcher that contains the immortality nectar.
Devotos Hindus believe that taking a dip at the confluence of three sacred rivers: the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati mythical) acquit them from sins and causes the salvation of the cycle of birth and death.
The organizers have compared the scale of this year’s festival to a temporary country, predicting up to 400 million pilgrims would visit before the last day of February 26.
The authorities waited almost 18 hours after yesterday’s stampede to give an official number of deaths, an apparent effort to minimize the interruption of day events.
Even before the last incident, attendees have furious what they said was a bad management of the crowd.
The reserved roads and the cordoned areas reserved for eminent attendees have been a source of complaints vehement at the festival to reduce the amount of space for common pilgrims.
Police this year installed hundreds of cameras on the festival site and on the roads that lead to the extensive camp, assembled in posts and a fleet of drones above.
The surveillance network feeds on an artificial intelligence system in a command and control center to alert the staff if the sections of the crowd are concentrated so much that they represent a threat of security.
More than 400 people died after they were trampled or drowned in the Kumbh Mela in a single day of the festival in 1954, one of the largest tolls in a disaster related to the crowd worldwide.
Another 36 people were crushed until death in 2013, the last time the festival was organized in Prayagraj.
