The stampede that occurred at special ticket counters established by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) in Tirupati for Vaikunta Ekadashi darshan, killing six people and injuring 15 others, is unfortunate. It marred the excellent record of the Tirumala temple administration in crowd management for several decades.
Vaishnava temples, especially in southern India, open special northern gates for Vaikunta Ekadashi and devotees believe that having darshan of their deity passing through the northern gate will give salvation. In the wake of this legend, most Vaishnava temples witness large crowds on Vaikunta Ekadashi.
In an attempt to reduce the crowd atop the Tirumala hill, the temple administration started issuing special darshan tickets for people through special counters set up in downhill Tirupati in 2022. The urge to secure darshan of their favourite deity led to jostling in queues of the ticket counters in 2022 and also 2023. However, neither the district administration nor the temple administration had anticipated that the situation in queues could get as worse as it did this year.
Law and order is the responsibility of IAS and IPS officers heading the district administration. It is their duty to envisage different scenarios developing out of a situation and prepare the administration to handle it. Nevertheless, it appears that the district administration had outsourced their duty to the TTD.
While the TTD’s intent behind special counters is commendable, it is difficult to fathom why it did not take lessons from the stampedes that occurred in 2022 and 2023.
It is also inconceivable that the state government led by tech-savvy chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu had allowed the TTD to adopt such a primitive way of forcing devotees to stand in queues for a day to secure the darshan tickets of Lord Venkateshwara. If the TTD had allowed devotees to register through a web portal or a mobile app and later selected a predetermined number of devotees through a lucky dip or computer-based random selection, the festival of Vaikunta Ekadashi would have been more fulfilling.