Lord Jagannath’s rath yatra starts

July 7, 2016 Hot from the Oven Valli Sarvani No comments

The famous rath yatra of Lord Jagannath has started yesterday. This is the 139th iteration of the yatra. It is a 15 km journey in Ahmedabad. The ride was covered by tight security arrangements. Lakhs of devotees queued up to get a glimpse of the deity.

The journey consists of the chariots of Lord Jagannath, his brother Balbhadra and sister Subhadra from the 400-year-old Jagannath temple in Jamalpur. It commenced with the Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel performing ‘Pahind Vidhi’. It is a symbolic ritual of cleaning way for the chariots.

The Mangla Aarti in the temple was even attended by BJP chief Amit Shah. The rath yatra consists of 18 decorated elephants, 101 trucks, and around 30 religious congregations and around 20 singing troupes.

The journey went through areas like Jamalpur, Kalupur, Shahpur and Dariyapur. After the journey, the procession of the rath yatra returned to the temple after about 11 hours of journey.

As the yatra is quite famous, the government arranged tight security arrangements to avoid any unwarranted situation. The arrangements at the temple were supervised by Gujarat Minister of State for Home Rajni Patel.

The Joint Commissioner of Police, city crime branch, JK Bhatt, said that the whole yatra was covered by 18,000 security personnel. This includes policemen, state reserve police and central paramilitary forces. The forces were deployed at various locations along the route.

The entire route was also monitored by the police using an extensive network of CCTV cameras controlled from control rooms.

Bhatt said that, there were 700 CCTV cameras, including night vision cameras installed at various locations along the route. This helped the police department keep a close watch on each and every movement. The police also used Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring purposes.

The security personnel for the yatra even included 9 IG and DIG level officers.

Image credit: The March of the Chariots image by picturesbypriyesh is licensed under CC BY 2.0