The common man's wait for the darshan of Lord Venkateshwara has ended as the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams has decided to resume the Sarvadarshanam tickets issuance on a trial basis from Wednesday.
The quota is limited to 2,000 tokens per day and would be initially issued only to the residents of Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh, where the famed Hindu shrine is located.
The Tirupati temple officials had stopped issuing the free darshan tickets/tokens in mid-April citing the alarming rise in Covid-19 second wave cases.
But the online sale of Rs 300 special darshan tickets continued and the daily quota was hiked to 8,000 tickets recently. However, the number of pilgrims availing darshan daily has been over 20,000 lately, which the officials say includes the VIP break darshans (Rs 500 per head) early in the mornings and the arjitha seva ticket allottees.
TTD had faced criticism for “the revenue generation model” while keeping the poor devotees away from Tirumala citing Covid-19 threat. Defending their decision, a senior official had earlier told DH that the Sarvadarshan token counters in Tirupati had incidents of crowding “raising fears of Covid-19 cases surge again in the temple town.”
On Tuesday, TTD issued a statement saying that free tickets would be issued from 6 am onwards at the Srinivasam complex in Tirupati. Officials appealed to the devotees to observe all the Covid-19 rules while collecting their tokens.
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Published 07 September 2021, 18:05 IST