On Sunday, as millions of Hindus across the world celebrated the vanquishment of everything that’s evil and sorrowful, over a 100 devout pilgrims died in yet another stampede at a religious gathering, some in the crush of an estimated five lakh people and others jumping into a river, numbed senseless by panic following rumours that the bridge was about to give way.
Almost simultaneously, about 1000 km away, a modern Indian bureaucracy had trumped the forces of nature, completing India’s largest ever evacuation of about a million people, anybody within five miles of the coastline that was battered by Cyclone Phailin.
A self assured Indian Met department scientist got it right, would not even admit that he felt vindicated, the alarmists in the West had been proven wrong. It could have been time for back-patting, before tragedy stuck anyway, unexpectedly.
Truth is, Dussehra’s stampede at the Ratangarh temple near Datia, Madhya Pradesh, will not be the last.
Only in February this year, at least 36 pilgrims died at Allahabad railway station, they were among the 100 million pilgrims attending the two-month Kumbh for a dip in the holy waters of the Ganga. It was the busiest day of the festival. It was the largest Hindu festival anywhere in the world, perhaps the largest religious gathering anywhere in the world. 39 million people would take a dip in the Ganga that day. But the railway station remained sorely unprepared.
In 2008, 145 people died in a stampede alongside a ravine near the Naina Devi shrine in the Himalayas. Also in 2008, at the Kanakadurga Temple in Vijaywada, six died in a smaller stampede. In march the same year, eight people died at the Mata Janaki Temple stampede in Karila, Madhya Pradesh. In June it was in Jagannath, Puri in Orissa, where a stampede killed six.
Incidentally, in at least one other incident – Allahabad this February – there were reports that it was a rumour that kick started the panic, also about a bridge, this time the foot overbridge at the railway station. In the end, it was intact, as it was this Sunday.
There are several things the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government could have learnt from the steady stream of stampede casualties at religious places, but then it’s obvious now that state governments and temple authorities responsible for managing such large gatherings and especially on special occasions give little thought to crowd management. And that’s why being a pilgrim in India implies having some appetite for risk.
Some lessons temple towns should be taking seriously:
- Planning ahead for crowd control is almost entirely absent at too many locations, notwithstanding the sterling efforts by some venues, including the Kumbh itself earlier this year.
- Maybe there was no way the Ratangarh temple authorities could have planned for a rumour about a bridge. But were they prepared for five lakh people?
- Indian pilgrims may not be the most orderly, getting them to walk in a single file in a single direction may not be the simplest task. But anticipated crowds can hardly be left to handle themselves, and a baton-wielding police force was the worst way possible to monitor and control them, stampede or otherwise.
The Kumbh saw traffic towers and barricaded queues, the Lalbaugcha Raja mega gathering has learnt how to use whistle-wielding volunteers, traffic monitoring volunteers and PA systems, all absent in Ratangarh. Volunteers dressed in easily identifiable uniforms, armed with basic communication equipment, crowd management by way of separating blocks of people, all of these are simple techniques to enforce a good level of orderliness.
A study published in The lancet following the death of 63 pilgrims in the Ram Janki temple in UP, in 2010 in what it called the fourth “major trampling” during a religious gathering in the preceding three years, said the researchers were able to identify 215 human-stampede events worldwide between 1980 and 2007, with 7,069 deaths and over 14,000 injuries. So it’s not an uncommon thing at all, globally.
“The Ram Janki Temple stampede shared many features of the deadliest events taking place in the developing world: high crowd densities (eg 10,000 people converging on a site designed to hold no more than 1000), the rising fervour of a religious celebration, the handout of scarce resources, failure to alert local authorities in advance, and inadequate security measures. Once the temple gates collapsed from the rush of the crowd, highly predictable and lethal mechanics leading to injury and death were set in motion,” the paper said.
Basic contingency measures for spaces where even moderate crowd-densities are expected should be mandatory, it suggested, adding that balancing the movement of crowds, offering access points for emergency evacuation, etc should be factored into all such events. Even more significantly, the research paper found a reluctance on the part of authorities and the general public to impose never before restrictions and rules to regulate these events even though they have grown unmanageably unwieldy and prone to disasters. That means not only is there no contingency plan, there is reluctance to consider drafting one. This exemplifies the foolhardy nature of those running temples and temple towns.
At a wider level, the Ratangarh tragedy underlines the end for greater attention to the causes and more thorough investigations into these incidents. A resignation or an expression of regret followed by announcement of ex-gratia must no longer be enough.
Do we know, for example, how many of those who died in Allahabad did not die of asphyxia, the most common cause for death in a stampede, caused by external pressure on the abdomen?
This study published in the Cambridge journals suggests that significant pressure of this kind can be exerted by even moderate crowds, maybe six to seven people in a small space pushing in one direction. Detailed studies to categorise the casualties into those with crushing injuries, those who were asphyxiated, studies on pedestrian dynamics, socio-psychological studies into ‘escape panic’, theories that the density of the crowd and it’s speed of movement could provide early warnings of a stampede — all of these must be done.
Or else it would have been a wasted Vidyarambham tragedy.
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