In Sadhrana village, Haryana and many others, fifteen or twenty people pool their money every year to book a truck. They load it with food, drinking water, and a generator, and set off overnight for Haridwar. Once there, they fill their kanwars (decorated bamboo yokes used to carry pots of holy Ganga water) with Ganga water and begin the journey back, mostly on foot, sometimes running for the last stretch, while the truck follows close behind, speakers blaring devotional songs to keep the group moving.
Multiply that one village by thousands across north India, and you start to understand how a personal act of devotion turned into a movement of more than four crore people a year.
This year’s Kanwar Yatra, which began with the start of Shrawan (July-August in the Gregorian calendar) on July 30, has once again drawn a saffron-clad river of pilgrims onto India’s highways. But the scale on display today — the drone surveillance, the tens of thousands of police personnel, the crores of rupees in economic activity — is a far cry from what the pilgrimage once was.
The real story of the Kanwar Yatra isn’t just what it is. It’s how it got this big.
Kanwar Origins: Where It All Began
Ask three different Kanwariyas where the tradition started, and you may get three different answers. Hindu mythology offers more than one origin story, and all of them have stayed in circulation.
One tradition traces the pilgrimage back to Lord Ram, who is believed to have carried Ganga water from Sultanganj in present-day Bihar to Deoghar in present-day Jharkhand, offering it to Shiva after Bhagiratha brought the Ganga down to Earth. Another credits Ravana, one of Shiva’s most devoted followers, with carrying Ganga water from Haridwar to the Pura Mahadev Temple in what is now Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh, after Shiva consumed the poison from the Samudra Manthan. A third points to Lord Parashuram, who is said to have carried water from Brajghat near Garhmukteshwar to the same temple, following a period of intense penance.
Whichever version you follow, the underlying idea has stayed constant for centuries: carrying Ganga water to a Shiva temple as an act of devotion. What’s changed is everything around it.
Numbers evolve: From Twenty Lakh to Four Crore
For most of its history, the Kanwar Yatra stayed a modest, regional affair. That began to shift sharply in the 1990s, when annual participation in Uttar Pradesh climbed to roughly 20 lakh devotees.
A 50-year-old woman from Bihar, recalling her own Kanwar journeys from that era, described taking jal from Sultanganj and covering the 105-kilometre stretch to Baba Baidyanath Dham, Deoghar with only three stops along the way. By her account, the crowds she walks alongside today have roughly tripled since then.
The numbers back her up. The 2000s brought organised camps, free food stalls, and vehicle-assisted kanwars, and the infrastructure of a much bigger event. By 2015, annual participation had reached close to two crore.
Today, that figure stands at more than four crore, making the Kanwar Yatra one of the largest annual religious gatherings anywhere in the world.
Different Kanwars, Shared Discipline
Every Kanwariya carries Ganga water, but not everyone carries it the same way. The most common form, Bol Bam Kanwar, allows pilgrims to rest as long as the kanwar itself never touches the ground. In Khadi Kanwar, the vessel must stay upright at all times, with a helper holding it whenever the pilgrim pauses. Jhula Kanwarinvolves a specially built kanwar with pots suspended on either side, hung up whenever the journey stops.
Then there are the more demanding versions. Dak Kanwariyas complete the entire journey without stopping, performing the jal (water) offering within 24 hours of collecting the water — fast enough that many temples set aside separate lanes just for them. Finally, the Dandavat Kanwar is widely considered the toughest: devotees repeatedly prostrate themselves on the ground, measuring out the distance to the temple by the length of their own bodies, a method that can stretch the journey across several days.
Across all these forms, the discipline stays largely the same: walking barefoot, avoiding alcohol, tobacco, leather, and non-vegetarian food, sleeping on the ground, and addressing fellow pilgrims as “Bhole” or “Bam” rather than by name.
Managing a Movement The Size of a Small Country
A gathering of four crore people doesn’t organise itself, and in recent years, the state’s role in the Yatra has grown almost as fast as the pilgrimage itself. This year, under a “zero incident, zero accident” plan, Uttar Pradesh deployed 35,000 civil police personnel, 151 companies of the Provincial Armed Constabulary, and 11 companies of paramilitary forces across 840 stretches identified as sensitive, supported by roughly 10,000 volunteers. Authorities also moved to identify establishments along the route and enforce restrictions on meat and liquor outlets more strictly, while tightening coordination with neighbouring states through which the routes pass.
Technology has become just as central to managing the crowds as boots on the ground. Around 3,000 CCTV cameras and 30 drones now monitor the major routes, alongside many police help desks and medical camps.
Most of the four crore pilgrims complete the journey without incident. But with numbers this large, disruptions do happen, highway blockages, occasional clashes, and property damage, and police increasingly lean on CCTV and drone footage to identify and act against offenders.
The Money That Moves With the Faith
The Kanwar Yatra has also quietly become one of India’s largest seasonal religious economies. Estimates put the total economic activity it generates somewhere between Rs 8,000 crore and Rs 16,000 crore, with the average Kanwariya spending between Rs 2,000 and Rs 4,000 over the course of the journey. Roadside dhabas, tent operators, transport services, and sellers of religious items all see a sharp seasonal spike in business along the major routes, including Meerut, Ghaziabad, Prayagraj, Agra, and Varanasi among them.
Local Footprint: The People Who Actually Run It
Behind those numbers is a layer the headlines rarely get into: The local networks, community funds, and volunteer groups that make a gathering of this size possible without any single organisation running the whole thing.
In Mumbai, Kamla Tiwari, who organises a kanwarprocession from the Malad Ram Mandir, told TheNews21 that the group’s kanwar travels each year to the Killeshwar Mahadev Temple on Madh Island, though rising crowds have forced organisers to redirect some devotees to nearby temples over the past two years.
Tiwari said, “The pilgrims fund their own participation, but food along the route is arranged by the Marwari Samaj every year, with several jalpan (refreshment) stops set up in between by locals.”
He said, “Around 50,000 people join this particular procession each year.”
A short distance away in Chembur Naka, organiser Ajit Rajaram talked about a kanwar group headed for the Shankar Deval Mandir near Vashi Naka. Now in its fourth year, the group travels with an ambulance on standby and provides fasting-appropriate food to every participant along the way. Rajaram noted that women consistently outnumber men in his group — a pattern he says holds true year after year.
About the funding, Rajaram clarified, “The group runs on a community fund called the Mahakal Sewa Samiti and modest support from the local MLA, with no large corporate sponsors involved.”
Rajaram also pointed out a detail that says something about how these processions try to keep the peace: the music is entirely live orchestra and bhajans — no DJ. His group also manages its own traffic by using only half of each road, a practice he adopted after police warned that permission for the procession would be withheld unless the group could show it could manage crowd discipline on its own.
Multiply Tiwari’s and Rajaram’s operations by the hundreds of similar community groups running Kanwar processions across the country, funded largely through local contributions rather than any centralised body, and the scale of the Yatra starts to make a different kind of sense.
This isn’t one event. It’s thousands of smaller ones, all timed to converge.
(Copy edited by Sonali Gill)
