Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri Drew About 51 Lakh Pilgrims in 2025, and the 900 km Road to Them Has Been Shaped by Two Supreme Court Orders on Width

Gangotri opened at 12:15 pm on 19 April 2026, the festival of Akshaya Tritiya, and Yamunotri at 12:35 pm, and All India Radio reported that the annual Char Dham Yatra in Uttarakhand had formally begun. Kedarnath opened on Wednesday 22 April and Badrinath on Thursday 23 April. A DD India report of 29 September gave the state government’s count for the season so far as 53,23,401 pilgrims.

When the temples close

Heavy snow closes Kedarnath each winter. Britannica says the temple shuts around Bhai Dooj, a festival that falls between October and November, and that its Shiva image is carried down to the Omkareshwar Temple at Ukhimath, about 1,300 metres above sea level, where worship continues. In 2025 Badrinath closed at 2:56 pm on 25 November, All India Radio reported.

The Shri Badarinath Kedarnath Temple Committee runs Kedarnath, Badrinath and 45 other temples, and its website says it was constituted under a 1939 Act. No closing dates for 2026 were posted there on 8 October. The site did show puja seats open from 10 October, 3,200 at Kedarnath and 1,813 at Badrinath.

What each shrine is to devotees

Yamunotri, at about 10,600 feet (3,200 metres), has the river goddess Yamuna as its chief deity, and Britannica says the river comes out of a glacier close by. Gangotri sits in cedar and pine woods at nearly 10,000 feet. Devotees hold that Shiva sat on a natural rock lingam there, now submerged in the river, when he received the goddess Ganga in his matted locks.

Kedarnath, at about 11,750 feet (3,580 metres) beside the Mandakini river, is one of the 12 jyotirlingas, the shrines of Shiva. The Shiva Purana, as Britannica summarises it, tells that after the war at Kurukshetra the five Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata went looking for Shiva to seek forgiveness. He took the form of a bull at Guptakashi and tried to sink into the ground, and Bhima caught the tail as the hump was about to vanish. Shiva told them to worship the hump, which stayed above ground at the place now called Kedarnath. The Kedarakhanda, a section of the Skanda Purana, has the sage Vyasa send the Pandavas to Kedarnath to be purified. In the same account four other temples are tied to parts of Shiva’s body: Tungnath (arm), Rudranath (face), Madhyamaheshwar (navel) and Kalpeshwar (hair). With Kedarnath they are the Panch Kedar, or five Kedars.

Badrinath, at some 10,300 feet on the Alaknanda river, is the abode of Vishnu. Tradition credits the 8th-century philosopher Shankara with installing its black granite idol, Britannica notes. The temple committee’s own page says both Kedarnath and Badrinath are “believed to be established by Aadi Guru Shankaracharya.” As Britannica reports the tradition, Shankara attained samadhi, a state of deep meditative concentration, near the Kedarnath temple and died there.

The nationwide Char Dham and Shankara’s four monasteries

Uttarakhand’s circuit is one of two lists called Char Dham. The Ministry of Culture’s release of 3 November 2021 names the other: Badrinath, Dwarka, Puri and Rameswaram.

Britannica’s entry on mathas, the monasteries of renouncers, names a different four that Shankara is said to have established: Govardhana Matha at Puri, Jyotih Matha near Badrinath, Sarada Matha at Dwarka, and Sringeri Matha in the south. Three places appear on both lists. In the south the pilgrims’ list has Rameswaram and the monastery list has Sringeri. Neither the Britannica entry nor the ministry release says Shankara laid out the pilgrim circuit itself. They set the shrines and his monasteries side by side.

Five seasons, several counters

Registration is compulsory. The Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board’s portal says the state’s travel policy makes it “necessary to register yourself and your vehicles before you start your journey,” and that pilgrims must verify themselves again at each shrine. The page calls the exercise free and says the registration letter carries a QR code. The temple committee’s site repeats the instruction.

The season totals come from different counters, and they do not line up neatly.

• 2022: 46,27,292, the figure Inventiva’s report gave a year later as the previous year’s total.
• 2023: 56,13,635 by 18 November, committee president Ajendra Ajay told The New Indian Express, as Inventiva reported. That includes 1,77,463 at Hemkund Sahib, the Sikh shrine. The four Hindu shrines were Kedarnath 19,61,025, Badrinath 18,34,729, Gangotri 9,05,174 and Yamunotri 7,35,244, which add to 54,36,172.
• 2024: ETV Bharat reported 46,17,445 at the four shrines between 10 May and 17 November, with 1,83,722 more at Hemkund Sahib and the Lokpal temple counted separately.
• 2025: All India Radio said 51 lakh devotees visited the Char Dham shrines, against 48 lakh the year before.
• 2026: 53,23,401 by late September, according to the state government, with Gangotri’s 8.41 lakh its highest on record.

The largest full-season total in these sources is the committee’s 56,13,635 for 2023. The 2026 season had not ended when this was written.

Two checks show what the numbers are. The 2023 and 2024 totals equal the sum of their shrine figures, so they appear to count visits, and a pilgrim who goes to all four would be counted four times (tuput’s reading). The broadcaster’s 48 lakh for 2024 matches the four-shrine total plus Hemkund Sahib and Lokpal, 48,01,167 by tuput’s addition, which suggests its figures include Hemkund Sahib. The 2026 report is similar. Its four shrine figures add to about 49.6 lakh, and its Hemkund Sahib figure of 3,52,765 brings the sum close to the headline. For another case of one official number carrying several definitions, see the Maha Kumbh count.

A road priced at Rs 12,000 crore and argued by the metre

The Road Transport Ministry announced the Chardham Mahamarg Vikas Pariyojna on 23 December 2016, ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foundation-stone ceremony at Dehradun on 27 December. The release described about 900 km of national highway at Rs 12,000 crore, two lanes with paved shoulders at a minimum width of 10 metres. The ministry’s affidavit before the Supreme Court later gave 825 km, of which 674 km were strategic and 151 km were not.

The judgment of 14 December 2021 records how the dispute ran. The ministry had split the work into 53 projects of under 100 km each. The National Green Tribunal, on 26 September 2018, treated each as a stand-alone project that needed no environmental clearance but set up an oversight committee. On 8 August 2019 the Supreme Court replaced that committee with a High Powered Committee chaired by Ravi Chopra. In July 2020 the committee split 13 to 5: thirteen members wanted two lanes with paved shoulders throughout, and five, Chopra among them, wanted the 5.5 metre intermediate width in the ministry’s 2018 circular.

On 8 September 2020 the court adopted the minority view, so the 2018 circular alone applied. The Ministry of Defence then applied to widen the strategic routes. In December 2020 the committee reported again, and 21 members recommended following the ministry’s 2020 circular for three roads, while three did not support changing the court’s order.

On 14 December 2021 a bench of Justices D Y Chandrachud, Surya Kant and Vikram Nath allowed the application for three highways: Rishikesh to Mana (281 km), Rishikesh to Gangotri (231 km) and Tanakpur to Pithoragarh (162 km). Together that is 674 km, by tuput’s addition, matching the ministry’s strategic figure. The ministry’s affidavit describes the design as a 10 metre tarred road. The bench wrote that the court, in judicial review, “cannot second-guess the infrastructural needs of the Armed Forces.” The 2020 limit stayed in force for the rest of the project unless the respondents sought relief again.

The approval carries conditions. The committee’s environmental recommendations have to be carried out, and an oversight committee under Justice A K Sikri, with members from NEERI and the Forest Research Institute, reports to the court every four months. The judgment says its job is “not to undertake an environmental analysis of the Project afresh.”

Scientists named in The Third Pole’s report of September 2020 disagreed in public. Hemant Dhyani, a committee member, told the reporter, “The greater the road width, the greater is the required slope cutting and the slope destabilisation.” The article reported that the committee found 102 of 174 freshly cut slopes on one route landslide-prone. The geologist Naveen Juyal said splitting 889 km into 53 projects of under 100 km avoided the impact assessment required above that length, and that all four valleys fit within a circle of 50 km radius, so the effects add up. J C Kuniyal of the G B Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development, also a member, voted for the wider road. He said fixing the width was the highway engineers’ job and that the committee should plan for growing tourism and traffic. The ecologist Chandi Prasad Bhatt said widening only at sharp turns would have avoided 90 per cent of the hill cutting.

June 2013: 580 dead and 5,474 missing, as the state gave it

On 7 August 2013 the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Mullappally Ramachandran, told the Rajya Sabha that, according to the Uttarakhand government, 580 people had died in the June floods and landslides and 5,474 were “missing and feared to be no more.” He called both figures provisional while verification continued, and said the state had paid Rs 5 lakh each to the kin of about 550 dead or feared dead. The two figures add to 6,054. No later final tally appears in the sources checked.

A note in Current Science of 25 July 2013, drawing on Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology rain gauges at the Chorabari glacier camp, recorded 210 mm of rain in 12 hours to 5 am on 16 June and 325 mm in 24 hours. It describes two events. The first was the flooding of the Saraswati and Dudh Ganga on the evening of 16 June. The second came at 6:45 am on 17 June, when Chorabari Lake collapsed. The lake sat at 3,960 metres about 2 km above the town, measured roughly 400 by 200 metres and was 15 to 20 metres deep. It emptied in 5 to 10 minutes, according to Wadia Institute staff at the camp. Britannica says the Kedarnath temple stayed standing while the structures around it were destroyed, shielded by a large boulder known as Bhim Shila.

Reconstruction began in 2014, the Ministry of Culture said on 3 November 2021. Its release says Shankaracharya’s samadhi was rebuilt, that works costing over Rs 130 crore were complete, among them retaining walls on the Saraswati and Mandakini and the Garud Chatti bridge, and that foundation stones were due for projects worth over Rs 180 crore more. It was published ahead of the Prime Minister’s visit to Kedarnath on 5 November.

The official advisory and the Wadia Institute’s warning

The temple committee’s “Tips for Safe yatra” page, read on 8 October 2026, says travel to the shrines “may expose the pilgrims to extreme cold, low humidity, increased ultraviolet radiation and reduced air and oxygen pressure.” It gives the State Emergency Operation Centre numbers 0135-2710334 and 1070 (toll free), and says helicopter shuttle tickets for Kedarnath can be booked only at heliyatra.irctc.co.in.

On the flood, the Current Science note says the India Meteorological Department linked the heavy rain to the meeting of the southwest monsoon trough with westerly disturbances over the higher Himalaya. Scientists are monitoring the Chorabari Glacier for its response to climate change, Britannica reports. On the road, the Supreme Court’s oversight committee reports every four months, and the High Powered Committee still oversees the parts of the project outside the three strategic highways.

The Wadia Institute note also looked ahead. Its authors wrote that the risk of disasters in the area had risen with human activity, and that the trend was “likely to increase in future as the activities like pilgrimage, tourism, etc. will increase.”