Puri: Nine swing doors will greet visitors travelling to Odisha’s pilgrim town of Puri during the Parikrama project inauguration on January 17.
These will be operated manually by the police and temple administration. The executing agencies have been asked to hand over the completed doors before January 11, according to reports.
These apart, the newly-built ‘Shree Setu’ (trumpet bridge), a 2.8-kilometre bypass stretch, would now allow vehicles coming from Bhubaneswar and Brahmagiri to directly reach a multi-level parking spot and visit the temple without entering the city while reducing travel time to the 12th-century shrine by up to an hour.
“A one-km Shree Danda has been created from Jagannath Ballav multi-level parking area till Simhadwar to minimise crowd load on Bada Danda. It runs parallel to Bada Danda. Devotees coming by vehicles from Bhubaneswar and Brahmagiri areas have to take Shree Setu bypass and arrive at Jagannath Ballav parking place. They will then use Sri Danda, which is the shortest route to the temple,” Collector Samarth Verma told a national daily.
He added that work on the corridor, Shree Setu and Shree Danda, are almost complete.
Odisha’s first trumpet bridge, which connects four lanes of roads, has been built on a stretch of 37 acres of land. These steps have ben taken based on the recommendations of the state-appointed Commission of Inquiry on better administration and governance of the Shree Jagannath temple and its endowments, including security and safety measures. To further ease the movement of devotees, the administration has installed a makeshift AC tunnel with benches attached to iron barricades that segregate around 10 rows, accommodating 3,000 devotees at a time, an official told PTI.
In the meeting held on Tuesday in presence of Chief Secretary Pradip Kumar Jena and revenue divisional commissioner Suresh Chandra Dalai, it was also decided that 120 platoons of police force to provide security for the VIP guests and smooth management of the inauguration ceremony of the project.
While the Heritage Corridor Project is expected to be completed by January 11, preliminary work for the yajna, leading to the grand inauguration, will begin on January 12.
Notably, the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD government has allocated Rs 156 crore for creating awareness about the Puri Parikrama project. ‘Prachar Rath’ (promotional vehicles) has also been rolling in every gram panchayat in the district from Saturday. The Jaganath temple administration has also sent teams to various shrines across the country and to Nepal to extend invites for the ceremony. Gajapati Dibyasingha Deb, who is also the chairman of the temple managing body, and the chief administrator met Swami Nischalananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Puri Gobardhan peeth, at Raipur and invited him to grace the inaugural ceremony.
The Parikrama project, a 75-metre free passage built around the Meghanada Pacheri or the outer walls of the shrine, is aimed to ensure security in the temple and provide basic civic amenities to devotees. It has been developed with an investment of Rs 800 crore.
