Preparations begin for Rath Yatra at ISKCON headquarters

Kolkata: The ISKCON headquarters in Mayapur is gearing up to celebrate Rath Yatra festival from July 4 to 12.

Rath Yatra of ISKCON is a symbol of communal harmony and peace. People from different religions take part in the festival. Mayapur is fast coming up as a world heritage site and the construction of the newly built temple is likely to be completed by 2020.

Jagadhartia Das, coordinator of Rath Yatra Committee said the three rathas of Lord Jagannath, Baladev and Subhadra will be taken out on 4th July from 1.30pm onwards from the ISKCON Rajapur temple and it will culminate at the main ISKCON Mayapur campus covering a distance of 6km. The rathas will pass through Bamanpukur, Balaldighi, Chand Kazi Samadhi, and Sri Chaitanya MahaPrabhu Janmsthan.

For this year a huge Pandal depicting the Jagannath temple is being set up which will become the Gundicha temple. The attraction for this year is the fair that is being organised around the Gundicha temple and the variety of cultural programmes to be presented by professional artists every evening.

Devotees from 80 countries are expected to participate this year. Considering the mammoth crowd that Rath Yatra at Mayapur pulls every year we have made elaborate security arrangements and also

plan to set up medical booths on the way to take care of people incase of any emergency, said Subroto Das, media spokesperson of ISKCON Mayapur.

The Rath Yatra was first celebrated by ISKCON in San Francisco in the year 1967 by AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada , founder Acharya of ISKCON and currently it is being organised in more than 1,000 centres across the world.