MP temple stampede: NDMA should also handle overcrowding

Even as the country justifiably hailed Orissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik for his government’s performance in handling Cyclone Phailin, one of the national institutions that basked in the glory was the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA). Patnaik and his state machinery had pulled off something remarkable - relocation of an unprecedented nine lakh people in 36 hours and reduced loss of lives to a handful. Elsewhere in the country - at Ratangarh in Madhya Pradesh - almost the same number of people walked into a man-made disaster as they were participating in the Dusshera festival. But, the NDMA was nowhere to be seen in the latter case, either to advise or to intervene, because its list of man-made disasters include only three categories: nuclear, chemical and biological disasters. Isn’t it strange that in the second most populated country where hundreds of people die in temple-tragedies due to unmanaged overcrowding - which are purely man-made - the NDMA doesn’t have a word on it, let alone any advice or plan on how to avert it? While following international templates on disaster management, what the NDMA doesn’t realise is that India is not America; not even sub-Saharan Africa. According to media reports, in the nine years preceding 2011, 900 people had died in India in temple tragedies. No part of the country is spared - whether it was the hill shrine of Sabarimala in Kerala or the Chamunda Devi temple in Rajasthan. While in Sabarimala 40 reportedly died, in Chamunda Devi the toll was five times higher. [caption id=“attachment_1170763” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The scene after the stampede. AP[/caption] The most recent before the Ratangarh stampede was in Allahabad during the Kumbh Mela, in which 36 people died. It’s almost certain that every big temple festival in India will have some casualties because of over crowding and poor crowd-management. The uncertainty is only on numbers. One of the reasons for the high toll in Indian temple festivals is the sheer number of pilgrims who visit them. During Kumbh, it’s about 10 crore people, and around three crore during the Sabarimala season.  These are unmanageably large numbers and unless Indians change their habit of public worship and crowding, the numbers will only swell. Advising people to avoid such tragedies by avoiding such gatherings is politically inflammable. And obviously, the expedient vote-bank idea is to exhort people to come out more and more and participate in such public demonstrations of worship irrespective of the faith. Since scaling down the number of people congregating for religious or faith-related public events, or people restraining themselves out of fear of getting “flattened to the ground” as BBC reported from Ratangarh  is impossible, is there any other way of avoiding such frequent tragedies? The only answer is crowd management. All the temple-tragedies, year after year, shows that we are nowhere near even the basic minimum. Let’s look at what the International Fire Code, assiduously followed by the western countries, stipulate on crowd management. It says that for any event with more than 1000 people, there should be one “trained crowd manager” to every 250 people. Translated into Indian numbers, it will need 400 “trained crowd managers” for one lakh people. For nine lakh, it’s 3600. Not unreasonable numbers in the Indian context - a state government and organisations which coordinate such temple events can easily mobilise police and fire safety personnel, and volunteers exceeding this number. But the issue is - are they trained and are there nationally held safety standards, such as access roads, public safety plans, use of right materials for constructing appropriate temporary infrastructure and contingency plans, when such large numbers congregate on spaces meant for much smaller crowds? The answer unfortunately is NO. In fact, in Ratangarh, the police was accused not only abetting the tragedy by lathi-charging, but of stealing money from the dead and dumping bodies into the river for reducing the death-toll. It certainly didn’t appear like the authorities followed basic safety norms such as access and infrastructure as well. In a paper on crowd safety by three academics from Tamil Nadu , they pointed to five reasons for such disasters when people crowd: “Big gatherings of people raise the odds of a dangerous occurrence happening. Secondly, individuals within a crowd always take for granted that others have the responsibility. Thirdly, big crowds or gatherings of people make changes in action slower and more complicated. Fourthly, big crowds or gatherings of people make communications slower and more complicated. And most importantly, big crowds of people raise the possible number of victims.” What the paper offers is a technical solution in crowd monitoring, in both obstructive and non-obstructive categories, an essential component of crowd management. This is one of the many isolated attempts at offering home-grown technical solutions. There are many more proposals such as limiting the number of people visiting a temple-site on a particular day by issuing a limited number of passes and expanding the window of festival season so that the flow of people can be staggered. All these, although very hard to implement because of political reasons and the inherent nature of religious crowds, are isolated efforts which work in some settings. But what the country needs is the recognition of crowding at religious and festive gatherings as a disaster-risk, or rather a risk for man-made disasters - and a corresponding national safety plan. It’s really intriguing that despite the deaths of hundreds of people every year, the disaster management authorities see no reason to do so. India should certainly prepare for nuclear, chemical and biological disasters, but the odds are heavily in favour of the inclusion of “disaster by crowding” in the NDMA’s list of man-made disasters.