Death toll in India pilgrim crush climbs

(Vatican Radio) The toll in the stampede of pilgrims at a train station in Allahabad on Sunday has reached 36 and is still climbing. And much of the blame is being attributed to poor crowd management at the Kumbh Mela, as the event is known. When it ends sometime in early March, it will have attracted a predicted 100 million bathers in the River Ganges, all eager to be cleansed of their sins. The Kumbh Mela comes once every 12 years to Allahabad and is an enormously important event in the UP state government calendar. This year’s tragedy has been blamed on baton-charging police and the slow response of medics. The festival’s chief organizer, Mohamed Azam Khan, who is also a state cabinet minister, has resigned. The crush at a train station on Sunday evening at Allahabad took place on a day when 30 million people had converged on the city. At the station, the rush to board trains to go back home became unbearable as thousands tried to get on to the platforms to board whatever services were available. As a result, the railings on the access staircase of one of the over bridges gave way, people fell and were crushed by other falling bodies. Most of the dead were women and the elderly. The crowd was so large because the day was considered particularly auspicious in the Hindu calendar. Survivors insist that the panic was triggered by the police using batons to get crowds moving, though the police themselves deny this. There was also criticism of the response to the disaster, with relatives recounting how the emergency services took hours to reach the scene. Several hours after the tragedy, corpses shrouded in white sheets could be seen on the platforms. The state government has ordered an inquiry, though the government has not announced the amount of compensation to be given to the next of kin of the deceased. This year's Mela is enormous even by previous standards. At the Kumbh Mela on Sunday, 30,000 volunteers and 7,000 police were on duty, urging pilgrims to take as little time as possible in the water. Listen to this report from Carol Andrade in India: