Kanwar Yatra

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The Kanwar Yātrā (Devanagari: कांवड़ यात्रा; also Kānvar or Kāvaḍ Yātrā) is an annual pilgrimage of devotees of Shiva, known as Kānvarias (Devanagari: कावड़िया) or "Bhole" (भोले), to Hindu pilgrimage places of Haridwar, Gaumukh and Gangotri (Uttarakhand) and Ajgaibinath Temple in Sultanganj, Bhagalpur (Bihar) in order to fetch holy waters from the Ganges River. Millions of pilgrims fetch sacred water from river Ganga and carry on their shoulders for hundreds of miles to offer it in their local Shiva shrines, or specific temples such as Pura Mahadeva temple in Baghpat and Augharnath temple in Meerut, Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, Baidyanath temple in Deoghar, etc. The Kanwar Yatra is typically held from the starting of Hindu Sawan Month, to the day of Shivratri. Kanwar refers to a genre of religious performances where devotees ritually carry water of the Ganges River from holy places like Gaumukh or Haridwar in Uttarakhand in containers suspended on either side of a pole. The pilgrimage derives its name from a sacred water carrying apparatus, called kanwar, and while the source of the water is often the Ganga, it can also be its local equivalents. The offering is dedicated to Shiva, often addressed as Bhola (innocent) or Bhole Baba (innocent saint). The yatra used to be a small affair undertaken by a few saints and older devotees until the late 1980s, when it started gaining popularity. Today, the kanwar pilgrimage to Haridwar in particular has grown to be India's largest annual religious gathering, with an estimated 30 million devotees in the 2023 and 2024 events. The devotees come from the surrounding states of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab, Bihar and some from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. Heavy security measures are undertaken by the government and the traffic on Delhi-Haridwar national highway (NH-58) is...