Hindu temple crush kills 37 children and 27 women in India

A STAMPEDE involving thousands of poor villagers scrambling for free food and clothes at a religious gathering left 64 dead – 37 children and 27 women – and injured at least 44 at a Hindu temple in northern India.

It is believed the crowd may have panicked after a wooden gate to the compound surrounding the temple in Kunda, Uttar Pradesh, collapsed.

"How could this happen in such a holy place?" cried Phool Chand Saroj, 48, a farmer whose wife, daughter and grandmother died in the crush. "If they had been more careful about letting in the crowds this would not have happened."

Most of the men were working in the fields when women from surrounding villages gathered with their children at Kunda for gifts given out to mark the anniversary of the wife of a local religious leader, Kripalu Maharaj.

Giving food, clothes and utensils to the poor on such occasions is a Hindu tradition.

Hours after the tragedy, piles of unclaimed shoes dotted the inside the compound where victims had placed them before entering the sacred ground.

The compound in Kunda, 110 miles south-east of the state capital, Lucknow, is believed to have been undergoing renovations. Bamboo and iron rods used in construction were left strewn about its grounds.

Police later cleared the compound after all the bodies had been taken to an adjacent hospital run by the temple, for post-mortem examinations and identification. Outside, villagers wailed in anguish when told their loved ones were among the dead.

Gudal, a 38-year-old farmer who uses only one name, wept over the death of her seven-year-old daughter, Ranjana.

"She had just wandered in to see what was happening," she said.

Deadly stampedes are relatively common at temples in India, where large crowds – sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands – gather in tiny areas with no safety measures or crowd control.

In 2008, more than 145 people died in a stampede at a remote Hindu temple in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The hand-out in Kunda is an annual tradition arranged by Maharaj and usually draws a few hundred people. However, the event was publicised more widely this year and drew several thousand villagers, said Raghuraj Pratap Singh, a state politician who represents Kunda.

By last night, all the victims had been identified and police had handed bodies over to relatives to carry back to their villages. As bodies were claimed, temple officials at the hospital gave out donations of 10,000 rupees (150) to bereaved families.