Severe overcrowding and a lack of exits contributed to a stampede at a religious festival in northern India, authorities said yesterday, leaving at least 121 people dead as the faithful surged toward the preacher to touch him and chaos ensued.
Five died yesterday morning and 28 people were still being treated in a hospital, local official Manish Chaudhry said.
Deadly stampedes are relatively common at Indian religious festivals, where large crowds gather in small areas with shoddy infrastructure and few safety measures.
Photo: AFP
About a quarter of a million people turned up for the event on Tuesday that was permitted to accommodate only 80,000. It is not clear how many made it inside the giant tent set up in a muddy field in a village in Hathras District in Uttar Pradesh.
It was also not clear what sparked the panic.
However, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath told reporters that a crowd rushed toward the preacher to touch him as he was descending from the stage and volunteers struggled to intervene.
An initial report from the police suggested that thousands of people then thronged the exits and many slipped on the muddy ground, causing them to fall and be crushed in the crowd.
Most of the dead were women.
The chaos also appeared to continue outside the tent, as followers again ran toward the preacher, a Hindu guru known locally as Bhole Baba, as he left in a vehicle. His security personnel pushed the crowd back, causing more people to fall, officials said.
Authorities are investigating and searching for the preacher as well as other organizers, whose whereabouts were not known.
Adityanath said he ordered an inquiry by a retired judge into the deaths.
Indian police registered a case of culpable homicide against two organizers, but excluded the preacher. Culpable homicide carries a maximum punishment of life imprisonment in India.
Binod Sokhna, who lost his mother, daughter and wife, wept as he walked out of a morgue yesterday.
“My son called me and said: ‘Papa, Mother is no more. Come here immediately.’ My wife is no more,” he said.
Followers of the guru from across the state — which is India’s most populous with more than 200 million people — traveled to the village, with rows of parked vehicles stretching 3km.
State official Ashish Kumar said there were insufficient exits in the vast tent.
It is not clear how many exits there were.
Experts said the event violated safety norms.
“The function was held in a makeshift tent without ensuring multiple exit routes,” disaster management expert Sanjay Srivastava said.
On Tuesday, hundreds of relatives had gathered at local hospitals, wailing in distress at the sight of the dead, placed on stretchers and covered in white sheets on the grounds outside. Buses and trucks also carried dozens of victims to morgues.
Sonu Kumar was one of many local residents who helped lift and move dead bodies after the disaster. He criticized the preacher.
“He sat in his car and left. And his devotees here fell one upon another,” Sonu Kumar said.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS