Tirupati: The Tirumala Lord Venkateshwara temple will open its doors to devotees on Thursday. The TTD authorities allowed the devotees for Darshan of Lord Balaji, following three days of trial run staring June 08.

The TTD was forced to issue Darshan tickets till June 17 on Wednesday following an overwhelming response from devotees who queued up at the token issuing counter from as early as 03:00am in the morning. The TTD released online tickets of 60,000 online tickets for the month of June got exhausted within two hours on June 08.

The response was equally big for the over the counter tickets as well, with devotees queuing of outside the ticket counters at Srinivasam, Vishnu Nivasam and Bhudevi Complexes in Tirupati from as early as 03:00 am on Wednesday, forcing the TTD’s vigilance and security wing to rush extra staff to the three venues to control the crowd and ensure people observed social distancing.

Though issuance of tokens was scheduled to start at 06:00am, hundreds of devotees started queuing up from 03:00 am itself, by 08:00pm when the counters closed, around 14,800 Darshan tokens were issued to devotees under slots till June 14, said TTD Chief Vigilance and Security officer.