People turn up for the yatra with false health certificates. The unfit must be weeded out at base camps if they are not detected before they enter Kashmir for the journey.
For Hindu devotees, the trek to the Himalayan shrine of Amarnath in south Kashmir has literally turned out to be a death trap, particularly this year. The yatra is both arduous and hazardous, going up to nearly 14,000 feet at some places on the Pahalgam route.
But little regard is given to this fact as lakhs of “yatris” make the devotional round each year. Nearly 100 pilgrims, across age groups, died of natural causes this year. Dozens of fatalities are known to occur each year. Fundamentally, the reason seems to be lack of adequate preparation on the part of the pilgrims themselves. But it is the failure of the administration to check and stop the ill-prepared from hazarding the climb that must be held responsible at the public level.
When 10 pilgrims died within the space of three days, the Supreme Court took notice last Monday. That naturally led to a flurry of activity and top officials, governor N.N. Vohra downward, fussed about trying to supervise arrangements. But it has been all too little and too late. As the medical community in Kashmir has observed, lack of acclimatisation and high-altitude sickness appear to be the principal causes of death. People turn up for the yatra with false health certificates which are shown up in a medical emergency. It is important that the unfit be weeded out at base camps, if they have not been detected before they enter Kashmir for the spiritual journey. The government needs to go into overdrive to reach out to the community to spread the message about the need to be fit enough for such a difficult trek, in addition to providing the physical infrastructure on which all the attention usually focuses.
Seeing this as a “Hindu” issue, a high-level BJP delegation comprising Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley has met Union home minister P. Chidambaram on steps to be taken to prevent deaths during the Amarnath yatra. Perhaps they have a point when they say that too many people squeezed in because the time frame for the pilgrimage has now been considerably shortened — from the earlier two months to just over a month. The organisers had argued that once the icicle “Shivling”, which forms naturally inside the Amarnath cave, melts, the hoary pilgrimage loses some of its meaning. But this argument may have to be given up in the light of experience.
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