Hyderabad lives through an extraordinary local holiday every year when most businesses are shut and tens of thousands take to the streets. It is the day marking the end of the Ganesha festivities, and idols, huge and tiny, are taken out in large and small processions for immersion in the central Hussain Sagar and other lakes across the city.

Though many opt for immersion of idols on previous days, the diehards who want to be part of the central procession on the final day make the massive arrangements a herculean task with the numbers growing with every year.

This is the 38th year of the mass ritual. The Bhagyanagar Ganesha Utsav Samithi, which networks the pandals and other organisers, says in all 63,000 idols were immersed this year, compared to 59,000 last year. Of the 10,232 Ganesha idols at pandals, 4,101 were immersed earlier and the remaining 6,100 on September 5 and even after the crack of dawn on September 6.

For this, the city was turned into a veritable fortress. For security measures, 27,265 police personnel equipped with 4,600 wireless sets were out on duty early on September 5. It included 410 mobile patrolling parties, 16 bomb disposal teams and two access control teams equipped with prodders, deep search mine and explosive detectors and the services of 22 sniffer dogs. There were also men with communication sets and sophisticated binoculars on rooftops at many places even as images beamed by 800 video cameras were monitored real time from a control room.

This is apart from the 15,000 CCTV cameras which were installed earlier as part of the security measures on the procession routes. Focusing on the illumination along the main procession route, over 33,000 additional street lights were erected at different places and temporary high mast lights set up at strategic locations. And to clean up the huge mounds of garbage that pile up fast, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation had sanitary workers, including those hired temporarily, working round the clock.

Though Hyderabad has ceased to be the communal tinderbox that it used to be until the late 1980s and now one of every five of its residents is Muslim, the police are always apprehensive about an outbreak of communal violence. Just hours before the final day of Ganesha idol immersions began, they went into a tizzy after several videos and photographs of communal violence in Utkoor mandal in Mahbubnagar surfaced on social media on September 4.

The Ganesha immersion day, in police parlance, is an annual occasion they wait for and then long for it to be over, unmindful of the phenomenal preparations.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

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