Durga Puja pandals are going up at about 512 places across Varanasi, with idols due to be installed at around 725 locations this Navratri. But with the festival a week away, several puja committees say the roads to their pandals are broken, street lights are dead and immersion kunds are still dirty. The Varanasi Municipal Corporation says the problems will be fixed before the festival begins.
Sharadiya Navratri starts on Sunday, 11 October, a day after Mahalaya on 10 October. Ashtami and Navami are being observed together on 19 October this year and Vijayadashami falls on Tuesday, 20 October. Committees that follow the Bengal tradition will hold Bijoya Dashami and their immersions on Wednesday, 21 October.
Work is moving fast at the sites themselves, with pandal building, idol making and decorative lighting all under way. The trouble is outside, on the roads that festival crowds will walk at night and that immersion processions will use on the way to the kunds, often with the idol carried on shoulders.
Rain in recent weeks has made things worse. On the stretch leading to the Hathua Market pandal, gravel has come loose in front of the IMA building and the road dips and rises near a sewer chamber. Patches near Arya Mahila, around Ramkatora and close to Town Hall are in poor shape, and the approach to the pandal at Sanatan Dharm Inter College is also damaged.
Shubham Seth, media in-charge of the Premier Boys Club at Hathua Market, said nothing had been done so far about roads, cleaning or street lights. Since crowds in the area run into lakhs during the puja, he said, police patrolling in the lanes should be increased for those days.
Suraj Jaiswal, acting president of the committee at Sanatan Dharm Inter College, said the road was bad and the street lights were not working, although cleaning was in order. A gate built at Lakshmi Kund was creating difficulty for immersion, he said, and no meeting with the committees had been held yet.
At the Mini Stadium in Shivpur, interlocking work is being done with the help of the area councillor, according to Rakesh Gupta, president of the Shri Shri Durga Puja Samiti. He said no meeting had been called and that the site still needed lighting and temporary urinals for women. In Pandeypur, Devansh Manish Chaubey, general secretary of the Kashi Sharadiya Utsav Samiti, said the roads had been dug up, no one had taken the initiative for a meeting, and the need for women's urinals rises sharply in a crowd.
Digging has also begun on the Sigra to Aurangabad road under the CM Grid scheme, leaving a torn-up stretch that hampers shops along the road and adds to the risk of accidents in the busiest weeks of the year. The kunds are another concern. At Mandakini Kund, remains from the Ganesh and Vishwakarma pujas are still lying in the water.
Additional Municipal Commissioner Durgesh Mishra said that, on the instructions of the mayor and the municipal commissioner, the corporation is getting in touch with the puja committees, and all arrangements will be put right before the mela begins. The corporation has already set out a wider plan: last month Municipal Commissioner Himanshu Nagpal ordered sanitation, lighting and pothole repairs around pandals, and on Friday he inspected immersion kunds and asked for extra drainage pumps.
Police are preparing a parallel list of their own. Puja committees have been told through local police stations that CCTV cameras, fire safety arrangements and volunteers are compulsory at every pandal, and that no new tradition should be started, under directions issued by Additional Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Shivhari Meena. Officers in all three zones, Kashi, Gomti and Varuna, have been asked to keep a close watch on sensitive areas, and about 30 new locations are expected to host a puja this year.
Traffic is likely to be the hardest part. Hathua Market, Pandeypur crossing, Machhodari, Jangambari and the Shivpur Mini Stadium are among the pandals that draw the biggest crowds every year, and several city corridors are already crawling because of construction, as Dalimss News reported in its look at jams on Lahartara, Manduadih and Akhari.
The committees are not asking for anything unusual: a road without craters, a lamp that works and a clean kund at the end of the procession. The corporation has given its word. Families walking pandal to pandal after dark from 11 October will see for themselves whether it was kept.
