9th International Conference on ICT for Sustainable Development

Authors - Deepanjali Mishra
Abstract - Covid 19, also known as Novel Coronavirus had its origin in a Chinese province called Hubei, in a wet market in the year 2019. This became so fatal that it got spread to all the countries of the world. I the first wave the countries which got affected were Ital, USA and India got affected in the second wave. Covid 19 caused havoc and destruction of lives. The countries which ws affected most during the first wave were Italy, USA etc and India got affected most in the second wave. Looking into the safet of the citizens, the governments imposed worldwide lockdown which forbade people from coming out of their homes. The summers which were spent on visiting pilgrimage sites in order to enhance their spirituality was paralyzed. It was during this time that people used to visit the shrines like Vaishno Devi temple in Katra, Amarnath Yatra was initiated during the holy moth of Sawan and after the Supreme court verdict on Shri ram temple people had started visiting Ayodhya. This led to a huge loss in the economy of the country. India is a country which is rich in its cultural heritage. It is said that there are 13 festivals in 12 months. So after the lockdown the festivals like Navratri, Ram Navami and Sawan kawar yatra could not be celebrated in the temples because of the restrictions imposed on them. Therefore the government of India decided to start with online aartis and facilated e -darshans of Mata Vaishno Devi during Navratri and Baba Barfani of Amarnath. The artis of Baba Amarnath is being continued on television and the devotees are getting darshans of Mahadev directly from the shrine as well as the daily aartis twice whole of Sawan. In the month of July Rath Yatra was telecast live from Puri which enabled people all over the world to have darshan of Mahaprabhu Shri Jagannath’s journey to his aunt’s house along with his siblings live on television. Therefore this paper is an attempt to analyse the problems created to the tourism industry due to Covid-19 and bring out the concept of having e- darshans of the shrines directly from the temples. The paper also would propose to discuss on the impact of spirituality of the devotees after the e- darshans.