A 27-year-old man was killed after sustaining injuries from being hit by his own bull while taking it to the Jallikattu venue at Periya Suriyur in Tamil Nadu’s Trichy district on Saturday, 15 January. Meenakshisundaram succumbed to his injuries while being rushed to a hospital.
Earlier on Saturday, a 19-year-old spectator was gored to death by a bull in Avaniyapuram. The deceased, identified as T Balamurugan, was at the exit point when the bull hit him, seriously injuring him.
Jallikattu is Tamil Nadu's traditional bull-taming sport that is held predominantly in Madurai and other districts of the state, during the harvest festival of Pongal.
It is being held from 14-17 January, amid COVID-19 restrictions.
As per the government guidelines, it is permitted to conduct Jallikattu, Manjuvirattu (roughly translating to ‘bull chasing’), and Vadamaadu (a different type of Jallikattu) events with participants not exceeding 300 persons. A maximum of 150 participants are allowed in an ‘erudhu viduthal’ event. The government had also instructed that the events should be conducted in an open space, with only 50% capacity of the arena to be filled by the audience.
All the participants, bull owners, audience, programme coordinators, and department officials were required produce a vaccination certificate that showed that they had got two doses, as well as a negative RT-PCR result in the past 48 hours before the event.
The event at Avaniyapuram began at around 7.30 am on Friday and saw the participation of over 700 bulls and 300 bull tamers. At the end of the second round, only 14 tamers sustained minor injuries, said the police. The festival will come to an end on Monday.
The event at Alanganallur is being held on Monday instead of Sunday as the state government ordered a complete lockdown on Sunday, in view of the rise in the number of coronavirus cases in the state.
This comes at a time when Tamil Nadu recorded 23,459 fresh cases of COVID-19 on Friday, taking the overall tally to 28,91,959. The positivity rate stood at 15.32 percent.
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