Most of those killed were women and children who were crushed as people scrambled for the free items Thursday at a Hindu temple in the small town of Kunda, on the northern plains of India's Uttar Pradesh state.
Police opened a criminal negligence case against the temple management, Superintendent of Police S.M. Mishra said. Relatives complained organizers should have done a better job of controlling the crowds. Ashok Kumar, a local government official, said the temple had not asked permission to hold the event.
But Rajnish Puri, a spokesman for the Jagat Kripalu Parishat trust that runs the temple, said he had informed local authorities about the event last Saturday, telling them they expected large numbers of people.
“But only two police constables were sent,” he said in a statement.
The event usually draws a few hundred people, but was announced more broadly this year and attracted several thousand villagers, said state lawmaker Raghuraj Pratap Singh, who represents Kunda, about 180 km southeast of the state capital of Lucknow.
While most men in the farming region worked in their fields, women gathered with their children to receive the alms.
The stampede was so intense it knocked down a gate at the compound surrounding the temple.
The compound appeared to have been undergoing renovations.
Bamboo and iron rods used in construction were strewn about the grounds, possibly causing some people to trip.
All the victims have been identified and the bodies given to relatives to carry to their villages, police official K.G. Khan said. As bodies were claimed, temple officials at the hospital gave donations of 10,000 rupees ($220) to families who lost relatives.
Deadly stampedes are relatively common at temples in India, where large crowds - sometimes hundreds of thousands of people - gather in tiny areas with no safety measures or crowd control. In 2008, more than 145 people died in a stampede at a remote Hindu temple at the foothills of the Himalayas.
