A stampede at a Hindu festival yesterday left at least 145 people dead, including 40 children, in the mountainous north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, according to local police.

The stampede was triggered by the collapse of iron railings along a narrow path leading to the hilltop Nainadevi temple, where tens of thousands of people had gathered for a festival that began on Saturday, police said.

Hundreds of people — mostly women and children — were trampled to the ground and many others fell down a steep slope as the panicking crowd tried to flee to safety, police and local officials said. Most of the victims died from suffocation, they said.

Bimala, a woman at the temple, told television reporters: “There were a lot of people inside and we were trying to fight for space when everyone started falling over.”

They were celebrating Shravan Navratas, a nine-day festival in honour of the Hindu goddess Shakti, or Divine Mother. Nearly 50,000 worshippers were expected to attend daily, but many more turned up yesterday at the temple in Bilhaspur district, about 90 miles from the hill station of Simla, the state capital.

Officials estimated that as many as 3,000 people were trying to cram into the temple when the railings collapsed. Television footage showed that the temple was packed with devotees gathered around a colourful float of Hindu deities. It also showed the bodies of several small children lying on a path and several other victims being carried on stretchers to a hospital, many writhing in pain.

Many of the deceased were from the neighbouring state of Punjab, from where local authorities had requested additional police. Police used a cable car to ferry down the dead and wounded, and helicopters were flown in to help with rescue efforts.

At Bilhaspur’s hospital, rescue workers unloaded bodies wrapped in brown blankets and laid them in rows to be identified by relatives. With the festival due to run for a further week, authorities were keen to reassure pilgrims that the situation was under control. C. P. Verma, the Bilaspur deputy police chief, said: “There is no need to panic, everything is normalised now.”

The Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh has reportedly offered compensation to those injured and to the relatives of those killed.

Temple stampedes are common during religious festivals in India, whose population of 1.1 billion people is about 80 per cent Hindu. Six people died in July at a popular Hindu festival attended by about a million people in the town of Puri in the eastern state of Orissa. In March, nine people died at a religious gathering in central India when a railing broke at the temple, triggering a stampede among 100,000 devotees.

In 2005 about 265 pilgrims were killed in a stampede near a temple in the western state of Maharashtra.

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