At least 168 devotees were trampled to death in a stampede at a temple in the city of Jodhpur in north India yesterday – the fourth such tragedy this year.

At about 6am a handful of pilgrims in a queue reserved for men slipped and fell on the steep path that leads to the Cha-munda Devi temple, part of the Mehrangarh Fort that towers over the popular tourist hub. People lost their footing because coconuts had been broken on the path as part of the religious rite, making it wet and slippery.

In seconds, panic broke out among more than 10,000 pilgrims who had gathered on the narrow route to ask for blessings at the start of the nine-day Hindu festival of Navaratri. Television footage showed scores of limp bodies being carried down the slope. Desperate attempts were made to resuscitate victims.

One five-year-old girl was shown hunched over her father’s lifeless body, crying: “Daddy, please get up.” Another child cried “mother, mother” over a motionless woman.

Witnesses described how chants of hymns had suddenly given way to wails from at least 100 injured pilgrims. Most of the victims died from suffocation.

“The narrow path became very slippery,” Kiran Soni Gupta, a local official, said. “Most of the dead are men and have no visible injuries.” Naresh Pal Gangwar, the district collector, said that at least 168 people died. Temple authorities dismissed suggestions that the stampede was exacerbated by rumours of a bomb. Much of India is on edge because of a terror campaign by Islamic extremists.

As the country’s middle class becomes wealthier, the number of people able to afford pilgrimages is rocketing while infrastructure and crowd management languish far behind, experts say.

A recent spate of deadly stampedes has stoked public anger. Last month at least 145 people, including 40 children, died in a stampede at the Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh. Weeks earlier, six people died at a 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.

Yesterday’s disaster was the worst in India since 2005, when about 265 pilgrims were killed in a stampede by a temple in the western state of Maharashtra.

One of the worst religious stampedes of recent times happened in July 1990 in the al-Muaissem tunnel near Mecca in Saudi Arabia, where 1,426 pilgrims died.

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