People gather on the banks of the Godavari river near the scene of a stampede in the Rajahmundry district some 200km northeast of Hyderabad yesterday.

Agencies/Hyderabad

A stampede on the banks of a river killed at least 27 people yesterday in southern India in a tragic beginning to a festival season.
The stampede in Rajahmundry, on the border of the twin states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, erupted about two hours after the dawn start of the Maha Pushkaralu festival which sees thousands of people bathe in the Godavari river.
“Twenty-seven people have now been confirmed dead in the stampede and another 29 are injured,” Parakala Prabhakar, a spokesman for Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, said.
District official H Arun Kumar put the number of injured at 40 while confirming that 27 people had died.
While the identities of all the victims had yet to become clear, police and other officials said most of the victims were women and included a 15-year-old girl.
Images broadcast on television showed tearful relatives grieving over lines of bodies on the river bank.
Rescuers wearing life jackets could also be seen trying to haul lifeless bodies into their inflatable rafts which were patrolling the river.
A Srinivasan Rao, a deputy superintendent of police in Andhra Pradesh, said the disaster happened when crowds built up around one set of steps leading to the water, known as ghats.
“The first set of worshippers were coming out of the river after taking a dip and then got in the way of others who wanted to be in the water at an auspicious time,” Rao said.
However Satyamurthy Chebolu, a volunteer for an organisation that helps run the festival, said the stampede happened when authorities sealed off a bathing ghat meant for the public in order to allow VIPs privacy.
The crowd apparently grew angry at being made to wait, and started pushing past the barriers.
“The problem was that they let VIPs go into the water while keeping the public at bay, so eventually the public got angry and demanded they be allowed to enter the ghat too,” Chebolu said.
“Some people started pushing from the back of the crowd, and that turned into a stampede where people got trampled. The police tried to stop them but the crowd easily pushed the police away.
“The crowd was huge - there were maybe 20,000 people in the area, and maybe 3,000 people in the stampede. The ghat is just not built for that many people. It was also unbearably hot, so many people were anxious to cool off in the water.”
Prime Minster Narendra Modi wrote on Twitter that he was “deeply pained at the loss of lives” and offered condolences to the families of victims.
The chief minister’s spokesman Prabhakar said that an ex-gratia compensation payment of Rs1mn had already been approved for victims of the stampede.
More than 15,000 police and 171 closed circuit television cameras were already in place to monitor the flow of visitors to the festival, officials said.
The incident did not deter pilgrims, who continued to pour into the festival grounds, carrying children and luggage above their heads or perched atop cars stranded in the throng.
The start of Maha Pushkaralu coincides with the official beginning of the larger Kumbh Mela festival in Nashik in Maharashtra.
Only a few hundred people attended a flag-raising ceremony yesterday which marked the opening and mass crowds are not expected to gather until the first main bathing day on August 29.
“The flag was hoisted at 6.16 am with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis presiding,” Nashik district information officer K Moghe said.
The Kumbh Mela is held every third year and is rotated between four sites.
It is held at Nashik every 12 years and, although it isn’t on the same scale as the editions on the Ganges at Haridwar and the Saraswati at Allahabad, it still draws millions of pilgrims.
Organisers of this year’s event at Nashik are desperate to avoid a repeat of a deadly stampede at the same venue 12 years ago.
Thirty-nine pilgrims were trampled to death and dozens injured when the festival was last held by the Godavari river in Nashik, around 160km northeast of Mumbai, in 2003.
The deadly crush was believed to have been triggered when a sadhu threw coins into a crowd of pilgrims who were waiting on the river banks.
Tens of thousands of the devotees, forced to stand behind barricades, were reportedly getting increasingly restless while having to wait for their holy dip.
When the coins were thrown they scrambled to gather them resulting in dozens of people suffocating, according to reports at the time.
Organisers expect up to 10 pilgrims to attend the main bathing dates, which fall on August 29, September 13 and September 18 and 20,000 police are being deployed to man the crowds.
Routes to the river have been changed to avoid steep slopes and overcrowding while a temporary intensive care unit has been set up to urgently deal with any injured.
Stampedes at India’s religious festivals, where a mixture of police and volunteer stewards are often overwhelmed by the sheer size of the crowds, are not uncommon.