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Hindustan Times
6 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Offline registration for Amarnath Yatra begins
Ahead of 38 day long annual Amarnath pilgrimage, offline registration began here in the temple city on Monday with the distribution of tokens to intending pilgrims, said officials. Pilgrims during collection of tokens for registration ahead of the annual Amarnath Yatra in Jammu on Monday. (PTI) 'Around 2,000 tokens were distributed at Saraswati Dham near Jammu railway station by the officials,' said an official. However, pilgrims outnumbered the tokens available for the day at Saraswati Dham, he added. Dharamvir Singh, 46, a pilgrim from Bihar's Patna, expressed regrets over poor arrangements. 'We were queued outside Saraswati Dham since 4 am to get tokens. It rained heavily. No proper arrangements were made by the administration,' he said. Another pilgrim Jai Prakash, 34, from UP's Lucknow cited how Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath conducted Mahakumbh in February. 'Here none was listening to us. The gates of the Saraswati Dham were closed and we were left at the mercy of God,' said Prakash. Some of the pilgrims also shouted slogans against the Jammu administration A female pilgrim, Meenakshi, 27, from Gwalior, was also furious over poor arrangements. 'There is no clarity among the officials, who have been assigned the task to issue tokens. Some of them are demanding documents in original and some are telling us that duplicate documents will serve the purpose. There is lot of confusion,' she said. However, bad weather, poor arrangements and recent Pahalgam attack failed to dampen their spirits. 'Come what may, we will undertake this yatra. This is one of the most revered yatras in Hinduism and every Hindu somewhere in his heart has a desire to pay obeisance at the cave shrine,' said Prakash. Sadhus clad in saffron have also started pouring into the city of temples. The 38-day pilgrimage to the 3,880-metre-high holy cave shrine of Amarnath will commence from the twin tracks — the traditional 48-km-long Nunwan-Pahalgam route in Anantnag district and the 14-km shorter but steeper Baltal route in Ganderbal district — on July 3. The first batch of pilgrims will leave for Kashmir from the Jammu-based Bhagwati Nagar base camp on July 2. Lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha will flag off the first batch under unprecedented security grid. Earlier, this morning, sub divisional magistrate Jammu South Manu Hansa said that distribution of tokens has started. He said after getting the tokens, the pilgrims can get themselves registered for the yatra on Tuesday and undertake the pilgrimage beginning July 2 from the Jammu base camp in Bhagwati Nagar. 'The registration will begin tomorrow at three centres — Vaishnavi Dham, Panchayat Bhawan and Mahajan Sabha. This is the only centre from where devotees can get the token. The centre opens at 7 am,' he said. The SDM said the per-day quota of tokens and registration is 2,000 each, and the counters will remain open till the daily quota is exhausted. Meanwhile, ahead of the pilgrimage, Jammu divisional commissioner Ramesh Kumar and IGP Jammu, BS Tuti conducted a successful dry run of the convoy on the Jammu-Srinagar national highway from Jammu to Banihal to ensure a safe and trouble-free yatra. Kumar and Tuti accompanied the convoy, which left the Bhagwati Nagar base camp in Jammu around 4.30 am. Kumar said that arrangements for food, shelter, sanitation and other essentials have been made after reviewing security and other arrangements along the highway in Udhampur and Ramban districts. Deputy commissioner Jammu Sachin Kumar told reporters that people should come in large numbers as the administration has made elaborate arrangements for a comfortable and secure pilgrimage. Police officials said foolproof security arrangements are in place along the highway, with a joint control room monitoring the movement of pilgrim vehicles through CCTV cameras. Officials working in emergency departments are also part of this joint control room to ensure a swift response to any situation, they said.
Indian Express
25-06-2025
- General
- Indian Express
Indian workers in Israel pick daily drill of sirens, shelters over evacuation
Having arrived in Israel to fill the construction industry void left by the Palestinian workforce after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, thousands of Indian workers have been getting accustomed to a harsh new reality: the conflict with Iran. Their daily life — working as masons, iron benders, carpenters, ceramic tilers, bakers and so on — is punctuated by frequent missile alerts on their phones and several dashes to the nearest bomb shelter, or 'miklat' as these reinforced spaces are called in Hebrew. The Indian workers appear largely undeterred by the waves of missile strikes and interceptions. Mohan Lal, who belongs to Himachal Pradesh's Mandi district and is a foreman at a workshop in Palmachim, 28 km from Tel Aviv, says there is no mad scramble to return to India through the government's evacuation plan announced on June 19. He is among an estimated 15,000 Indian workers who arrived in Israel through government and private routes following a 2023 bilateral framework agreement. 'About 350 Indian workers have left and maybe 600 more have enrolled to go back to India. Thousands others are feeling quite safe mainly due to the system of phone alerts and sirens being deployed in Israel,' says Mohan Lal, 33. He described how, in the days following the June 13 attacks by Iran, they would have to rush several times in the day and night to the shelters, but now that was needed only once or twice a day. The 'miklat' he usually uses is one of the small concrete containers built near their workshop, which can accommodate up to a dozen people. He says that he recently visited the Ramat Gan area of Tel Aviv to see the damage caused to buildings by Iranian missile strikes, but added that there were no visible signs of damage in Palmachim where he worked. In contrast to these single-room shelters, other Indian workers describe gigantic fortified public shelters which can accommodate up to 1,500 people and are located at every 500 feet in Tel Aviv. Dharamvir Singh, 43, who belongs to Jind in Haryana, has been working as a ceramic tiler in Israel since a year. He has been using one equipped with air conditioners, lounge chairs, toilets and so on. He is working on the tiling of a 27-storey building in Tel Aviv — six of its storeys are designed to serve as underground bunkers. 'More and more, bigger and bigger bomb shelters are being built everywhere in Israel,' he says. 'The difference I find from the earlier phase of attacks by Hamas and the current shower of ballistic missile attacks from Iran is that the alerts give us 20-25 minutes to reach the shelters instead of the earlier 10-15 minutes. We are getting more time to rush to safety.' Gurdeep Chouhan, also from Jind, describes a similar experience of the need for rushing to shelters coming down after a peak two weeks ago. He is working in a well-known bakery, Angel's, along with a large group of Indians in a place called Lod, 15 km from Tel Aviv. He says: 'There is less danger in small places like where we are, which are on the outskirts of the large cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. It is in the big cities that the military establishments, refineries and multi-national companies are located and they could be the target of future attacks.' Subhash Chand, a 33-year old carpenter from Punjab's Hoshiyarpur, says the threat is not from precision bombing but debris from missiles intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome. He says there was panic among their families back home in Punjab because of old videos showing extensive damage to Tel Aviv. 'I have been in Israel for over a year and we are all liking it here. There are no jobs in India. If we take up the offer of the Indian government and return home we will surely regret it,' says Subhash Chand. 'Israeli companies and supervisors respect Indian workers. We feel safe because of the system of alerts and sirens. The phone alerts tell us when to go inside a shelter and let us know when it is safe to come out and go back to our shift duty.' Most of the Indian construction workers The Indian Express spoke to reveal they were earning between `1.5 lakh-`2.5 lakh every month in Israel. 'Even a collector does not earn so much in India. We are not planning to return now and will go on leave only for Diwali as decided earlier,' says Surendra Singh Saini, a driller who arrived in Israel from Jhunjunu, Rajasthan. He says they had got used to a daily drill of missile attacks and shrieking sirens as well as the 'timeout' spent in protected spaces. 'When the missiles are intercepted, we look to the skies and hear the sounds of patakaas (fire crackers) going off. That's all,' he says. There are several Indian supervisors and managers working on large construction sites where hundreds of Indians are employed. They have taken it upon themselves to mentor and guide the workers through this dangerous phase. Dharma Kachawa from Pushkar, Rajasthan arrived in Israel seven years ago is among the Indian supervisors. He says he has a WhatsApp group of 400 Indian workers, employed with the Israeli construction giant Solel Boneh and currently working in a town called Tzur-Yigal. Kachawa, 35, says he does his best to keep Indian workers informed of any potential danger, in case they are unaware of missile attacks. 'The fact is that some ballistic missiles are going through and they do cause damage. So I keep asking each and every Indian worker about his well being. I ask them not to wait for the sirens and move towards safe shelters once the phone alerts come.' Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India's most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ's Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More
