57-year-old man dies during crowd surge at Bahuda Yatra in Puri: Police

A 57-year-old devotee from Cuttack died during a crowd surge at Puri’s Bahuda Yatra, taking the reported death toll linked to this year’s Rath Yatra to four.

A 57-year-old devotee from Cuttack died during a crowd surge while pulling one of the chariots during the Bahuda Yatra in Odisha’s temple town of Puri on Friday, police said.

A Cuttack devotee died of suspected suffocation while pulling Goddess Subhadra’s chariot during Puri’s Bahuda Yatra, police said. (PTI)

The deceased, identified as Abhiram Das, reportedly complained of breathlessness while pulling the Darpadalan chariot of Goddess Subhadra and collapsed amid the massive crowd gathered on the Grand Road (Bada Danda), police officers said.

Volunteers, fellow devotees and Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel took Das to a nearby hospital, where doctors declared him dead on arrival.

Officers said preliminary findings indicated that Das died of suffocation. His body was sent for postmortem, and his family was informed.

Several other devotees also fell ill during the procession and were admitted to a hospital, officers said.

Devotees thronged the Odisha temple town on July 16 for the annual Rath Yatra despite rain and waterlogged streets after Puri received more than 200 mm of rainfall over the previous 45 hours.

The Odisha government had earlier confirmed two of those deaths, saying a 60-year-old unidentified man died of suffocation while another devotee, Anil Das of Cuttack, suffered a cardiac arrest. The state government attributed both fatalities to a sudden crowd surge rather than a stampede.

The Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) later confirmed a third death after Ashok Subare Raikar, a devotee from Mumbai who had fallen ill during the Rath Yatra, died while undergoing treatment at the Puri District Headquarters Hospital on July 16.