More than 100 people were killed and many others were injured in a stampede during a Hindu religious event in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where thousands of devotees had gathered.
Most of the dead so far have been women and children who appeared to have suffocated in a crush to leave the venue, in the small city of Hathras, said Ashish Kumar, the district magistrate there.
“As of now, the confirmed death toll is 116 people,” said Chaitra V., a top civil servant in the Aligarh administrative region, which includes Hathras.
Local officials suggested that heat and overcrowding had set off a panic. Eyewitnesses, speaking to local news media, said some of the victims had fallen into a drainage ditch on top of one another.
The event, a large Hindu prayer meeting, was organized by a guru locally known as Bhole Baba who has been leading such gatherings for more than two decades. The crush took place at the end of the meeting, which was held under a large tent.
Rajesh Singh, a police officer in Hathras, said a permit for the event had allowed for 5,000 people. But initial information from the scene indicated that the crowd was much larger than that, he said in a telephone interview.
More than 150 people have been admitted to different hospitals, he said.
Umesh Kumar Tripathi, a medical officer in the neighboring district of Etah, in western Uttar Pradesh, said that as more victims were taken to hospitals, “the death toll may rise.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was speaking at India’s Parliament when news of the deaths reached him, said that his “administration is engaged in relief and rescue work.”
“I assure everyone through this House that the victims will be helped in every way,” Mr. Modi said.
Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with about 240 million people, said an investigation into the cause of the stampede has been opened.
Unverified videos on social media showed a large number of dead bodies, mostly those of women, in the courtyard of what looks like a government hospital.
In India, stampedes during religious pilgrimages are relatively common, often because of poor enforcement of public safety measures. In one of the deadliest in recent years, more than 100 people were killed in 2013 in the north-central state of Madhya Pradesh during a Navratri procession, a celebration of the Hindu goddess Durga.
In recent years, the authorities have increased surveillance of large religious gatherings by deploying more police officers and using drones.
“Both the state and federal governments have failed to develop a sensitive approach toward crowd management,” said a member of India’s Parliament, Manoj Kumar Jha. “As a nation we are good at drawing crowds, but not good at managing them.
“Every year, these kinds of incidents keep repeating themselves, and we learn nothing.”
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