Rain-soaked Puri ready to celebrate Rath Yatra amid tight security

The chariots of Lord Jagannath and his two siblings will roll on Grand Road of this seaside pilgrim town on Thursday, as nearly two lakh devotees have already reached here to celebrate the annual Rath Yatra despite heavy rains, officials said.

The administration has made elaborate security arrangements to prevent any untoward incident and taken steps to tackle waterlogging along the route that the chariots will take.

Puri received a staggering 143.8 mm of rain on the eve of the iconic chariot festival, and the weather department issued a warning for downpour and thunderstorms for Thursday.

Special arrangements have been made to drain out rainwater from the Grand Road and facilitate a smooth procession, as devotees will pull the chariots of Lord Jagannath, Lord Balabhadra and Devi Subhadra along the thoroughfare from the 12th-century shrine to the Shree Gundicha temple, around 2.6 km away.

Devotees will begin pulling the chariots at 4 pm after the traditional chariot sweeping by Puri’s titular king Gajapati Maharaja Dibyasingha Deb and Puri Shankaracharya Swami Nischalananda Saraswati’s visit, a temple official said.

The temple town has been blanketed by a multi-layered security cover with the deployment of around 13,000 personnel from the state police, central forces, Indian Navy and Coast Guard, while special focus is on crowd control, traffic management and emergency response, the officials said.

According to the schedule, the rituals to bring the idols out of the temple and seat them on the chariots will be held between 9 am and 1 pm.

Three people were killed and several others were injured in a stampede near the Gundicha temple, considered the birthplace of the sibling deities, during last year’s Rath Yatra.

A special strategy has been drawn up to avoid such a situation this year, an official said.