The Hindu
NEW DELHI, INDIA, February 15, 2004: The Public Accounts committee (PAC), which recently visited the Sabarimala Ayyappa temple in Kerala, was “horrified” at the inhuman conditions in which the pilgrims stayed there, and felt that the problems of pilgrims should not be looked at merely from the environmental angle, says this article in the Hindu. In its 63rd report, the committee expressed its “total dissatisfaction” with the present conditions prevailing in the hill shrine. Though the pilgrims were ready to endure all kinds of hardships and adversities, it was impermissible for responsible authorities to use it as a convenient pretext for inaction and leave them to fend for themselves. “The total lack of sanitation, clean drinking water, hygienic food, toilet facilities in a place visited by nearly 30 million pilgrims in a short span of two months cannot be explained away by saying that the concept of comfort is alien to the ethos of Sabarimala pilgrimage,” the committee said, pointing out that there was an increase of about 20 percent in the number of pilgrim arrivals every year. The committee suggested cleaning of the river Pamba, from where 70 percent of the water requirement is met, and the hill tracts from Pampa to Sannidhanam should be reasonably widened.