72-year-old Punjab pilgrim dies of cardiac arrest at overcrowded Banke Bihari Temple in UP

AGRA: A 72-year-old man from Punjab's Jalandhar district died after suffering a cardiac arrest amid overcrowding at the Banke Bihari Temple in Vrindavan on Tuesday evening.

CCTV footage of the incident, widely circulated on social media, has sparked concerns about crowd management at the popular temple dedicated to Lord Krishna.

Police said the deceased, Randhir Talwar, had come to the temple around 5pm with his wife Shanti, daughter Reena, and son-in-law Sanjay Kumar.

After standing in a queue for a long time, he went for darshan and received prasad.

Soon thereafter, he suddenly collapsed on the temple floor and was rushed to the district hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival.

The incident comes just days after another elderly woman devotee from Haryana died in a similar manner at the same temple.

Vrindavan SHO Ravi Tyagi said that the autopsy report had revealed that the woman also died due to cardiac arrest.

Overcrowding at the Banke Bihari Temple continues to be a matter of grave concern. On Wednesday, two female devotees, one from Rajasthan and another from Madhya Pradesh, fell ill while waiting at the temple gates.

A day before, a 36-year-old woman from Indore fainted near Gate 1 of the temple after darshan but recovered after receiving treatment.

In response to these incidents, the UP govt had formed a committee under former DGP Sulkhan Singh which had recommended construction of a temple corridor to control the crowds.

In Nov last year, the Allahabad high court had approved the construction of the temple corridor modelled on Varanasi's Kashi Vishwanath Temple Corridor.

With a projected cost of Rs 262 crore, the corridoris desi gned to accommodate over 10,000 devotees at a time.


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