The sheer scale of pilgrims wanting to pass through the ceremonially opened northern gateway at Srirangam and to receive darshan at Tirupati on this single day has made crowd management one of the central practical challenges temple authorities face each year, and major South Indian temple trusts now use timed-entry tickets, online booking systems and extensive barricaded queue lines, along with large deployments of police and volunteer staff, to move the enormous numbers of devotees through in some order rather than as an uncontrolled crush at the gate itself.
Some temples have introduced paid express-entry options alongside free general queues, a practice that has drawn periodic public criticism from devotees and commentators who argue that a spiritual privilege promised to all who fast and keep vigil should not effectively be available faster to those who can pay for it, a tension between the egalitarian religious idea behind the open gate of Vaikuntha and the practical realities of managing crowds that can run into the hundreds of thousands at a single temple on a single day.
Beyond the great South Indian temples, Vaikuntha Ekadashi is also kept by Gaudiya Vaishnava communities worldwide, including ISKCON temples across North America, Europe and elsewhere, where devotees observe the same waterless fast and hold all-night kirtan and scripture readings, extending a festival rooted in specific Tamil temple architecture, the physical northern gate at Srirangam, into a global devotional calendar observed by congregations that have no equivalent gate to pass through at all.