27 killed in India stampede on onset of Maha Pushkaralu festival
A deadly stampede on the onset of the Maha Pushkaralu festival on the banks of India’s Godavari river leaves at least 27 participants dead.
The Tuesday incident in the city of Rajahmundry, on the border of the twin states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in southern India, took place about two hours after the festival started at dawn.
"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, told AFP.
Meanwhile, a local district official, H. Arun Kumar, said the number of injured was 40. However, he confirmed that 27 people were killed.
Satyamurthy Chebolu, a volunteer for an organisation that helps run the festival, said the stampede happened when crowds around the steps leading to the water, known as ghats, started pushing from the back and that turned into a stampede where people got trampled.
"The police tried to stop them but the crowd easily pushed the police away," he said.
"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," he added.
Prime Minster Narendra Modi expressed his deep pain at the loss of lives and Prabhakar said an ex-gratia compensation payment of one million rupees (USD 15,750) had already been approved for victims of the stampede.
Stampedes in India are commonplace due to the large population and sheer size of the crowds gathering there.
In 2003, in the city of Nashik in the western state of Maharashtra, which is also located on the banks of the Godavari river, a similar stampede left 39 people dead.
In 2013, 115 people were killed at a stampede near a temple in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, where there had been another deadly stampede seven years earlier.
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