Divisional Commissioner for Jammu Province B S Jaswal said he has, however, requested the state government to either increase the period of pilgrimage or the daily quota of yatris to enable more devotees to have darshan of the holy ice lingam. The registration of fresh pilgrims will depend upon the decision of the state government, he added.

Jaswal, who was accompanied by IGP Jammu Range Kuldeep Khuda and Director Tourism S S Bhalla, said the government had fixed a daily quota of 3,000 pilgrims in order to ensure smooth conduct of the yatra. However, they maintained the daily figure had touched the mark of 3,800.

Accordingly, against the government's initial estimates of only 80,000 pilgrims having darshan fromJuly 5 to August 8, they expect the figure to touch 1.25 lakh during the period, he added. However, people from various parts of the country were still arriving here to perform the pilgrimage despite their having not got themselves registered for the purpose, he added.

Jaswal said eight pilgrims have so far died en route the holy shrine. Regulation of the yatra had been a daunting task involving about 30,000 persons drawn from the administration, police and paramilitary forces, he added.

Bhalla said even though they had advertised in the vernacular and the national newspapers an appeal urging intending pilgrims to send applications even by post to any of the eight centres in the country for registration, a large number of people still continued to arrive here for on-the-spot registration. This had caused lot of problems to the registration officials in accommodating them, he added.

The IGP, however, expressed satisfaction over the smooth conduct of the ongoing pilgrimage despite attempts bythe Pakistan Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) to disrupt it. Referring to Major Shah Gill of ISI in Sialkot (Pakistan) and a militant leader Bilal Beg, Khuda said they had been receiving alarming reports about their plans to disrupt the yatra.

Pointing out that Harkat-ul-Mujahideen had imposed a ban on the yatra, he said the outfit could not succeed due to massive security bandobast right from Lakhanpur bordering Punjab up to the Amarnath shrine in the Kashmir Valley. For the purpose, the government had deployed 17 companies of Border Security Force, 28 companies of Central Reserve Police Force and 12 companies of the State Police, besides Army troops deployed en route the shrine to flush out militants.

A number of militant attempts to disrupt the yatra were foiled by the police and the security forces on the basis of information provided by locals belonging to the majority community, he added. In this connection, he recalled that the security forces, on an informationprovided by some locals in Anantnag, had recently killed three militants in an encounter in Banihal. Similarly, the Border Security Force recently killed three Pakistani intruders near the international border in Arnia sector and also recovered several highly powerful improvised explosive devices (IEDs).