Nine devotees—including eight women and one child—perished in a catastrophic stampede on the morning of November 1, 2025, at the privately owned Sri Venkateswara Swamy temple, dubbed “Mini Tirupati,” in Kasibugga, Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh. The incident unfolded amid an unannounced surge of worshippers on the sacred Hindu observance of Ekadashi, with five others sustaining injuries. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu squarely attributed the disaster to the temple management’s failure to notify police or local authorities, depriving the state of any chance to deploy crowd-control measures. “Had they informed us, we would have provided police protection and controlled the crowd,” Naidu asserted during a public address in Sri Sathya Sai district, where he observed a two-minute silence for the victims.

Compounding the chaos, sources revealed the shrine—still under construction—operated with a single entry-exit point, a glaring safety lapse that funneled thousands into a bottleneck. Government officials confirmed the temple falls outside the purview of the state Endowments Department, operating instead as a private entity that neither sought permits nor anticipated the Ekadashi turnout. Naidu, speaking later at the Peddala Sevalo program in Peddannavaripalli, lamented the irony: “While I am trying to save every life in a cyclone, some private individual is doing such things.” He pledged a comprehensive inquiry and vowed “strict action” against those responsible, framing the tragedy as preventable negligence rather than systemic failure.

Opposition leader and YSRCP chief Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy seized the moment to lambast Naidu’s TDP-led administration, branding the stampede a damning indictment of governmental incompetence. “This repeated loss of innocent lives reflects the inefficiency of Chandrababu Naidu’s administration,” Reddy declared, citing prior crowd-related fatalities as evidence of chronic lapses in protocol. He accused the state of abdicating its duty to enforce safety standards at high-risk religious gatherings, regardless of ownership. The verbal volley has thrust the incident into the political arena, with both sides leveraging public grief to underscore rival narratives of responsibility versus oversight.

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The Kasibugga tragedy echoes a grim pattern in India, where unregulated private shrines and unnotified mega-events have triggered deadly crushes—most infamously the 2022 Indore temple stepwell collapse (35 dead) and the 2016 Vijayawada pushkaralu stampede (27 dead). Experts advocate mandatory crowd-capacity audits, multi-exit mandates, and real-time coordination with district disaster teams, measures Naidu insists would have been activated had the temple complied. As investigations commence, the spotlight intensifies on bridging the regulatory void between private faith enterprises and public safety, ensuring devotion never again exacts such a devastating toll.

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