Amid reports of poor crowd management by the state machinery in the wake of the heavy rush of pilgrims in the ongoing Chardham pilgrimage, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday asked the officials to find alternate routes to decongest the roads to easy movements of the pilgrims.

Dhami instructed senior officials not to allow unregistered vehicles and those not carrying valid fitness certificates in the hills on the pilgrimage route.

The Uttarakhand chief minister took to the driver’s seat to monitor the Chardham pilgrimage as he travelled to the different halting points created for the pilgrims in the hills.

He held meetings with district officials and asked them to find all possible alternate travel routes and inform the pilgrims about them in order to decongest the roads facing bottlenecks due to the unprecedented heavy rush of the devotees this season.

“Alternate routes should be looked for as per the requirements of the situations in view of overcrowded conventional routes. Devotees must be given due information about these routes for the proper crowd-management and their convenience in the Chardham Yatra 2024,” said the chief minister chairing a meeting with the Uttarkashi district and police officials.

Dhami instructed the state Transport Department officials to take special care while verifying the fitness of the vehicles coming on Chardham pilgrimage routes. “If any vehicle is found running without fitness certificates, the responsibility should be fixed on the transport officers concerned and action be taken. No vehicle without fitness certificates be allowed to travel in the hills and unregistered devotees should be restricted to the holding points, especially created by the administration, till they get registration done.”

The chief minister reached out to the pilgrims to find out the problems they faced. “This year, we are witnessing an unprecedented rush of the pilgrims for the Chardham Yatra. The footfall at Kedarnath, Gangotri, Yamunotri, and Badrinath temple premises was twice their carrying capacities. As a result, crowd management has become a big challenge as the preparations made by the government proved insufficient.”

“However,” he said told the officials, “Things now have to be normalised with all the efforts to ease the traffic woes. The pilgrims, who have already travelled a considerable distance and are not held up at holding points made for keeping unregistered devotees, will not return without visiting the shrines. But all efforts will be made to stop them at Rishikesh and Haridwar before they start their journey.”

All four Chardham shrines have witnessed a heavy flow of devotees in the first seven days of the pilgrimage that began on May 10. More than two lakh pilgrims have visited the temple so far. This is double the figure of 2023 which was less than a lakh. The same is the case with Yamunotri where more than 12,000 pilgrims arrived daily, more than double the number last year for the same period.