Hathras stampede: How to not let crowds turn chaotic

In January 2025, over 30 million people, which equals almost half the population of France, will descend on the banks of Sangam at Prayagraj in the Maha Kumbh in a single day. Even on the non-peak days, more than 300 million people are expected to attend the Mela over the 50-day period, which makes the daily figures even for the rest of the days no less staggering. The news of yet another stampede leading to 116 deaths in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh due to overcrowding in a religious gathering yesterday attests to the importance of the need for preemptive planning to avoid any untoward incidents during the Mela, which, if not taken proper care of, could result in a far bigger disaster resulting in massive casualties.

In this context, the World Health Organisation defines a mass gathering as a “planned or spontaneous event where the number of people attending could strain the planning and response resources of the community or country hosting the event”. The Olympic Games, the Hajj, the Kumbh Mela, and large-scale sporting, religious, and cultural events are all examples of mass gatherings. The challenges of mass gatherings are many, with crowd management being the most significant.

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To be sure, crowd disasters are not new to mankind. History is replete with such events, not just in India but on the world stage at large. A 2018 study conducted by IIT Delhi mentions that a total of 137 stampedes have occurred all over the world between 1883 and 2017, which has resulted in the avoidable loss of lives.

It is also observed that the frequency of stampede occurrences has been increasing since 1980. The deadliest single human stampede in the past century occurred in Baghdad in 2005, with 965 deaths reported during a religious procession. Closer home, around 115 people were killed and more than a hundred injured in November 2013 after a stampede at the Ratangarh temple in Madhya Pradesh, where more than 150,000 people gathered to celebrate Navratri.

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Not just in India, mass gathering disaster struck even in the much more endowed South Korea as recently as October 2022, as at least 146 people died and another 150 were injured when they were crushed by a large crowd pushing forward on a narrow street during Halloween festivities in Seoul. Further, recurrent spates of killings due to overcrowding are a common occurrence at Haj pilgrimage, at least once every few years.

As such, stampedes can occur in various types of mass gatherings, which could pertain to religious, sports, entertainment, festivals, political, and other such events. Amongst all types of mass gatherings, religious gatherings lead to maximum casualties and injuries to the tune of 64 per cent and 51 per cent respectively. Some triggering factors leading to stampedes have been fire, structural failure, narrow passages, overcrowding, and sometimes even false alarms and rumours. Out of all the triggering factors mentioned above, narrow passage causes about 27 per cent fatalities, followed by overcrowding and rumours at 23 and 21 per cent respectively. While the risks of avoiding mass gathering disasters cannot be completely ruled out, mitigating steps such as interventions on the above aspects could significantly reduce these risks.

As can be seen from the disparate examples, crowd disasters are not a function of the poor socio-economic status of a country or merely its being overpopulated; they instead occur on account of inadequate planning, improper resource allocation, inexperience with crowd management and crowd control, issues in fire safety, inadequate emergency services, limited trauma care, and limited onsite and first responder communication capabilities. These, of course, become especially salient with respect to India given its highest population in the world, even as routine everyday congregations of people at places such as transport hubs, marketplaces, and places of worship take the shape of mass gatherings.

A 2017 study by IISc Bangalore mentions that common pedestrian behaviours in crowds like group formation, self-organisation, the leader-follower effect, queue formation, and bottleneck conditions have significant influence on crowd dynamics. Crowd collapses and crushes are catastrophic incidents that can occur when a congregation of people becomes dangerously overcrowded. It is, in fact, the crowd density rather than the crowd size that is the critical element in any mass gathering. When a body of people reaches or exceeds the density of four to five people per square metre (about 2.5 square feet per person), the pressure on each individual can cause the crowd to collapse in on itself or become so densely packed that individuals are crushed and asphyxiated. At such a density, a crowd can start to act like fluid, sweeping individuals around without their own volition.

While it’s a fact that previous Kumbh Melas have largely gone incident-free on account of better preparedness, the administration can’t let its guards down as every subsequent Kumbh Mela would attract even greater numbers than witnessed so far.

The accident-free Kumbh Mela, which attributes to adequate preparedness, also points to the fact that a lot of emphasis has gone into preparing for large-scale mass gatherings of the scale of the Kumbh, while incidents like those in Hathras indicate that there was inadequate preparedness and response plans for day-to-day mass gatherings.

Hence, the best practices from events such as Kumbh Mela could be applied to relatively smaller gatherings such as Hathras and should become part of the preparedness and response plan of district administrations across the country in order to ensure the safety of the event participants. Even in the case of future Kumbh Melas, the best practices could be reinforced with a special focus on capacity building and the transmission of best practices to crowd marshals and administrators.

The Hathras tragedy could have been avoided by adopting crowd management strategies such as the implementation of crowd monitoring systems, employing trained manpower for crowd control, instituting robust multi-authority preparedness and cooperation, planning exit routes to minimise delays in response to emergencies, and deploying rescue service specialists, as suggested by a 2012 UK study. Emergency Medical Services, with adequate training and experience, will expedite the management of multiple medical casualties, and pre-planning with local hospitals will supplement the emergency response.

Lastly, the administration needs to fix the accountability on the organisers, as prior permissions detailing crowd numbers and attendant arrangements need to be furnished well in advance by the organisers. Any violation of declarations should be dealt with stringently and could be criminalised.

As a nation whose population is projected to grow from 1,400 million to 1,600 million by 2050, more planning and preparedness for mass gatherings will be needed to avoid the recurrence of such tragedies in the future. Let us ensure that no more human life is lost, and let us take this as a lesson learned to avoid another Hathras.

The author is a paediatrician from India and is currently pursuing a PhD in “Health in Emergencies and Disasters” at the School of Public Safety at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.