Fatigue kills devotee on Grand Road

PURI: Amid heavy a rush of devotees on the New Year day, a person died after taking ill while waiting in the serpentine queue at the gate of Jagannath temple on Sunday. P Shankar Rao (65) of IRC village, Bhubaneswar, fainted while proceeding in the bamboo corridor put up on the Grand Road to have a glimpse of the deities at the 12th century shrine. He was immediately taken to the district headquarters hospital where the doctors declared him dead, hospital sources said, adding that the cause of the death was being ascertained.ANOTHER INJURED: In another incident, one Rajendra Goud of Cuttack suffered a serious head injury after being beaten allegedly by the police personnel who were controlling crowd on the Grand Road. He has been admitted to the district headquarters hospital here.STUDENTS RESCUED: In another incident, three students of a Bhubaneswar-based engineering college were rescued from drowning in the sea while taking a dip. All the three were rushed to the district headquarters hospital and later, one of them was shifted to SCB Medical at Cuttack as his condition deteriorated.   Condition of the remaining two was stated to be stable.Expecting a large crowd on Sunday, the district administration made arrangements including putting up barricades and deployment of police personnel. SP Amitendranath Sinha, District Magistrate Arabind Agarwal and temple chief administrator P K Mohapatra oversaw the arrangements. “However, there was no cover atop the long barricades nor was any emergency exit point which led to the incident,” a devotee said. Alleging mismanagement by the district administration, Jagannath Swain Mohapatra, chief ‘Daitapati’ (priest) of the temple, said the authorities had neither consulted the priests nor the local citizens about measures to be taken on the occasion. “Besides, putting up long barricades on the sprawling Grand Road without Chamundia (cover) and intermittent exit points was a serious lapse on the part of the district administration and the devotees were seen facing a lot of problems,” Swain Mohapatra alleged. After about four days of cloudy sky under the impact of the cyclonic storm, the weather remained clear.