Heavy rush at Sabarimala, more than a lakh visit temple over weekend

The Sabarimala Ayyappa temple has been witnessing heavy rush of nearly one lakh pilgrims during the weekend days, which even forced the temple authorities to keep the temple open for 30 more minutes.

On Friday 97,310 pilgrims had turned up, while it was 88,480 on Saturday. On Sunday around 60,000 had booked the virtual queue system for darshan.

During the last two years there was a steep fall in the number of pilgrims due to the Covid related restrictions.

The heavy rush also led to a minor commotion on the trekking path on Saturday. Kerala High Court had sought a report from the temple authorities.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan will be holding a high-level meeting on Monday to review the arrangements.

Sources said that the police might suggest that the maximum pilgrims on a day need to be restricted to 85,000 so as to avoid risks of stampede. At present up to 1.2 lakh pilgrims are allowed to book for darshan on the virtual queue system daily.

Opposition leader V D Satheesan of the Congress criticised the government for alleged lapses in arrangements anticipating rush of pilgrims in the post-Covid scenario.

Meanwhile, the revenue of the temple was also learnt to have crossed Rs 100 crore in the first three weeks of the two month long annual pilgrimage.

Sources said that the revenue so far reached around Rs 125 crore, which was about 40% more than the revenue during the corresponding period of the pre-Covid years.

While the temple had a revenue of over Rs 250 crore in 2019, in 2020 it fell down to around Rs 20 crore owing to Covid.

This had badly affected not only Sabarimala but hundreds of other temples under the Travancore Devaswom Board that were depending on revenue from Sabarimala.