Every few years, heartbreaking headlines emerge about stampedes at religious gatherings, concerts, or political rallies in India. The Kumbh Mela, which draws millions of pilgrims, has witnessed multiple tragedies over the decades. In 2013, a stampede at the Allahabad Kumbh left 36 dead. In 2015, another religious gathering in Andhra Pradesh saw over 25 devotees lose their lives.
More recently, in 2022, a crowd crush at the Mata Vaishno Devi shrine resulted in 12 deaths. The pattern is clear—India struggles with crowd management, yet it refuses to learn from past mistakes.
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A mass gathering is not just a collection of individuals; it is an organism of its own. Fear, anxiety, and urgency spread rapidly, and in dense settings, panic can be lethal. Despite this, event organisers often focus only on logistics—placing barricades, marking entry and exit points, and deploying security personnel—while ignoring the psychology of how crowds behave.
Faith-driven gatherings, such as the Kumbh Mela, rely on the assumption that devotees will follow rules. But faith is emotional, not logical, and expecting millions of people to move in an orderly fashion without clear, proactive control measures is an invitation for disaster.
A critical flaw in India’s crowd management strategy is the lack of adequately trained personnel. Security staff and police officers who manage such events may have experience in law enforcement but are rarely trained to handle mass gatherings where a single misunderstanding or miscommunication can set off a deadly surge.
Without personnel who can anticipate and guide crowd movement effectively, chaos becomes inevitable.
Every tragedy follows the same cycle—an initial wave of shock, outrage, and promises of reform, only for the urgency to fade as soon as the event is over. Risk assessments, safety audits, and crowd control improvements are often neglected until another disaster strikes. The result is a repetitive, avoidable loss of lives.
Other countries have faced similar challenges and taken proactive steps to prevent future incidents. Japan employs zoned crowd management, dividing attendees into controlled sections to prevent overcrowding.
These solutions are not out of reach for India, but implementation requires a shift in priorities from makeshift arrangements to long-term structural changes.
Crowd management is not just about organising space; it is about understanding human behaviour. People do not always act rationally in high-density situations, and safety planning must reflect that reality. Instead of cramming as many people as possible into limited areas, event planners need to consider movement patterns, emergency exits, and psychological factors that drive human behaviour in crowds.
Real-time crowd monitoring, using AI-driven tracking and heat maps, could help authorities identify congestion points before they turn dangerous. More importantly, security personnel and volunteers must be trained specifically for managing massive crowds rather than reacting to disasters once they unfold.
What happens after an event is just as important as what happens during it. Post-event debriefings should be mandatory, not as a formality but as a tool for continuous improvement. Authorities need to study what worked, what didn’t, and implement changes rather than letting valuable lessons fade into obscurity.
India hosts some of the world’s largest religious and cultural gatherings, but that should not mean accepting stampedes and crowd disasters as inevitable. Success should not be measured by record-breaking attendance numbers but by how safely and efficiently an event was managed. Faith, celebration, and public gatherings should not come at the cost of human lives. With better planning, scientific understanding, and a commitment to safety over spectacle, India can ensure that mass events remain occasions of joy—not tragedies waiting to happen.
(The author is the Commissioner of Police, Guwahati and STF Chief, Assam. All views and opinions expressed in the article are the author's own)
