(14 Jul) The much awaited Godavari Pushkarams 2015 commenced today with pilgrim turnout aplenty in Rajahmundry. Pilgrims are visiting Raj...
(14 Jul) The much awaited Godavari Pushkarams 2015 commenced today with pilgrim turnout aplenty in Rajahmundry. Pilgrims are visiting Rajahmundry for pushkar snanam and pitru tarpanam. Those who went and took a close look at the place expressed immense dissatisfaction over the government's failure to organise a event in a decent way. There are several flaws one can notice in the arrangements made by the government. Let us try to analyse them one by one. Firstly, the government planning has failed miserably in arranging transport to the devotees coming from the outskirts of city to the bathing ghats. All private vehicles are banned for over 4 kilometres outside the river bank and some free buses are arranged without proper route map which has led to havoc. There is no idea about the free bus station which can take people to the ghat area, as all the people deployed over there to oversee the bus arrangements are non-locals. Even drivers and conductors are not aware of the local routes. This has caused frustration among devotees and they have started walking on the roads leading to traffic jams. Secondly, crowd management at at ghats too is improper with two queues -one for entry and the other for exit. When so called VIPs and VIP pass bearers reached the places they were allowed entrance through exit gates and vice versa. This naturally caused public to protest and push the authorities to allow them too. Thirdly, Police barricades at the ghats are unnecessary which has caused prolonged queues and delay in completing the bath at good pace. There are no separate pandals for shradha karma so people who came for bath and who needed to perform the pitru karma ritual had to wait on the bathing ghats itself which caused space constraints leading to pushing and stampede. Nearly 25 people lost their lives officially and many are missing. Loss of lives could have been averted if they put up medical emergency centres at a closer vicinity. Laser shows are well planned and managed but both the government authorities and police ignored the main show management. Sad thing is that all these happened in the presence of our visionary chief minister Mr.Chandra Babu Naidu. By Raghu bhushan Eranki [Rajahmundry] The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organisation.
