Fifteen individuals died in a stampede on Saturday at New Delhi’s primary railway station as a crush of pilgrims have been making an attempt to make their method to an enormous Hindu competition in northern India, an official mentioned.
The caretaker chief minister of the Delhi area, Atishi, who makes use of one identify, advised reporters exterior a hospital within the capital that 15 individuals had been injured within the stampede, along with the 15 killed, based on Indian media stories.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed condolences for the useless in a statement on social media, including that the authorities have been “helping all those that have been affected by this stampede.” Ashwini Vaishnaw, the nation’s minister for railroads, said that an investigation had been ordered.
Earlier than the stampede, crowds on the railway station had swelled as a result of trains certain for the competition, the Kumbh Mela, had been delayed, based on native media stories. The Ministry of Railways mentioned it later ran extra trains to alleviate the crush.
The Kumbh Mela, which started in mid-January and can finish late this month, is the world’s largest non secular gathering. It’s anticipated to attract greater than 400 million individuals over six weeks, based on authorities estimates.
The competition takes place each three years in certainly one of 4 cities in India. This 12 months’s occasion is being held in Prayagraj, within the state of Uttar Pradesh, the place the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers meet. Hindus imagine {that a} third, legendary river referred to as the Saraswati joins the opposite two there in a sacred confluence. Devotees take baths within the holy waters within the perception that they wash away sins.
The occasion this 12 months, which is being referred to as a Maha Kumbh, or Nice Kumbh, is bigger than standard as a result of it coincides with a celestial alignment that takes place as soon as each 144 years.
Managing the large crowds who attend the competition is a serious problem for the Indian authorities.
Final month, 30 pilgrims died in a stampede as they rushed to take their baths. In 2013, the final time that Prayagraj hosted the occasion, 42 individuals have been killed in a stampede on the prepare station there. Ten years earlier than that, within the western metropolis of Nasik, 39 devotees have been crushed in an alley.
In 1954, in the course of the first Kumbh Mela since India’s independence seven years earlier, a whole bunch of pilgrims died in a stampede.
