At least one person died while eight other were injured, of which four are in serious condition, in a stampede in Cuttack district on the occasion of Makar Mela on Saturday, the police said.<\/p>\n
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The untoward incident happened on the Badamba-Gopinathpur T-bridge where a large number of devotees had gathered for Makar Mela. The devotees were crossing the bridge to visit a fair and also to pay obeisance to Lord Singhanath near the bridge.<\/p>\n
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Local MLA Debi Prasad Mishra confirmed that a 45-year-old woman named Anjana Swain died in the stampede, while four seriously injured persosn were admitted to the SCB Medical College Hospital in Cuttack city.<\/p>\n
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The other injured persons were admitted to the nearby community health centre (CHC) in Badamba, he said.<\/p>\n
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Speaking to reporters following the incident, Athagarh sub-collector Hemanta Kumar Swain said an un-expected number of devotees were visiting the shrine Lord Singhanath. The number of devotees swelled this time since the festival was allowed after a gap of two years owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
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Devotees from Cuttack and nearby districts such as Khordha, Puri, Angul, Dhenkanal, Boudh and Nayagarh districts had come to the temple in large numbers.<\/p>\n
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Meanwhile, the locals alleged that the administration was not fully equipped to manage such a large number of devotees. Adequate number of police personnel were not put in place, they alleged.<\/p>\n
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Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik expressed grief over the incident and announced ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh for the family of the deceased.<\/p>\n
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The Chief Minister also instructed the concerned officials to provide free treatment to all the injured persons.<\/p>\n
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At least one person died while eight other were injured, of which four are in serious condition, in a stampede in Cuttack district on the occasion of Makar Mela on Saturday, the police said. The untoward incident happened on the Badamba-Gopinathpur T-bridge where a large number of devotees had gathered for Makar Mela. The devotees […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-main-stories","category-odisha"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22751"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22753,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22751\/revisions\/22753"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}