The steep slope had been closed to heavy vehicles. A police checkpoint stood at its foot. Sometime around 1:30 on Sunday morning, a paddy-laden truck came down the road from Chhinor anyway — through the barricades, into the crowd, and finally into the gate and outer wall of the Sheetla Mata Temple in Gwalior.
At least 12 people were killed on the spot. Authorities later confirmed one more death in hospital, taking the toll to 13. Thirty-nine people were taken to hospitals across the city; five or six of them were in critical condition with fractures as of Sunday morning.
The devotees — pilgrims travelling in large numbers to the temple during Navratri, the nine-night Hindu festival honouring Goddess Durga — were gathered on the road when the truck veered left and ran them down. Two police personnel on duty at the checkpoint were injured as well.
Gwalior’s Senior Superintendent of Police, Dharmveer Singh, told the ANI news agency the truck had been stopped at the barrier and then broke through. “The devotees who were on the road were crushed underneath it,” he said.
An eyewitness, whose brother was among the injured, described the moments before impact: the truck was overloaded, appeared suddenly, and ran over shops and people near the temple before smashing into the building’s gate. “There is still chaos at the spot of the incident,” he said.
Sheetla Mata — also spelt Shitala — is a Hindu goddess associated with healing and protection from disease, and her temple in Gwalior draws steady streams of worshippers during the festival season. The road from the Chhinor side descends on a steep gradient, which is exactly why heavy goods vehicles are barred from it.
Why the truck was on that road is now the central question
Gwalior Collector Ruchika Chauhan, the district’s top civil administrator, said an investigation had been launched into how the vehicle managed to cross the barricades and the police checkpoint set up along the route during Navratri. A team from the Regional Transport Office has been sent to inspect the truck mechanically and determine what made it veer left on the slope.
It is the second Indian festival tragedy in two days. On Saturday, a stampede at the Chorbagan Durga Puja pandal in Kolkata killed 19 people, most of them crushed in a crowd surge; police there have detained 12 people, including organisers, and a special investigation team is probing lapses in crowd management.
Those two disasters, 1,500 kilometres apart, share a grim lineage. India loses more than 150,000 people to road crashes every year — roughly one in ten road deaths worldwide — and festival seasons keep producing the same pattern: huge crowds, overstretched local police, and a lethal gap between the restrictions that exist on paper and what actually gets enforced on the ground.
At the Sheetla Mata Temple, the restrictions were very much on paper. A stopper. A checkpoint. A road officially off-limits to heavy vehicles. By Sunday morning, a truck had gone through all three, and thirteen families were preparing funerals.
Doctors at Gwalior’s hospitals say the toll could still rise — five or six patients remained critically injured as relief teams cleared the wreckage from the temple gate.
Related: 17 Killed in Kolkata Durga Puja Stampede; Modi Announces Rs 2 Lakh Compensation · Death Toll in Kolkata Durga Puja Stampede Rises to 19; 12 Detained as SIT Probe Ordered
