It was the first day of the Godavari Pushkaralu, the Kumbh Mela of the South. The muhurtam was for 6.26 am on July 14, 2015. Every 12 years, over 12 days, across 11 cities in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, devotees throng the ghats on the banks of the 1,465 km-long Godavari river to offer prayers.

This year’s event was even more significant — celebrated every 144 years, it was the Maha Godavari Pushkaralu.

Believers, numbering in lakhs, had already arrived in the town of Rajahmundry. Many had camped overnight outside the ghats to take a holy dip at the auspicious time. AP chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, his family and a host of VIPs in tow, arrived at the Kotagummam area for the formal launch. For over an hour, the VIPs performed puja and offered prayers at the Pushkar ghat, even as crowds waiting at the three gates grew restive.

Two kilometres away, at the railway station, several trains arrived, bringing hundreds of devotees, who quickly made their way to the venue. Growing impatient, a few people climbed onto walls and burst through the barricades. Columns of people flowed into the river, pushing and jostling each other.

According to reports, some devotees bent down to look for their missing footwear, shattering the fragile balance of the crowd, which had reached a critical density. The crowd was not losing control as much as it was losing its view, first of the bathing ghat and then of the exit routes.

Nearly two lakh people were packed, elbow to elbow, in the 145m-long ghat. Physics soon took over, triggering a stampede that left 27 dead (official count) and around 50 injured.

Lakshmaiah arrived that morning from Bhuvanagiripalem, Nellore, with his wife and daughter. From the railway station they walked to the ghat in Kotagummam. Among the first few devotees, they placed themselves near the barricades to wait out the next few hours. In the ensuing stampede, Janakamma, 55, died of asphyxia. Daughter Sushma sustained injuries and was taken to the government hospital. Ponniah, who works as a bus conductor, lost his wife Rajeshwari. His 16-year-old daughter Swetha was wounded. Avva Krishna, an auto driver from Visakhapatnam, lost his wife Bayramma, 45, and 16-year-old daughter Gowri. Padma’s 60-year-old mother went missing that day. Days later, her body was identified at one of the hospitals in Rajahmundry.

Science of it

How do human stampedes begin? How does the crowd behave in a stampede? Are emotions like fear and panic contagious? How do ‘mass gathering’ events go right, and how do they go wrong? The anatomy of a stampede, it would appear, is governed by the laws of physics and complex psychological processes that are little understood.

While the ‘crowd’ was defined from “a psychological point of view” in 1896 by Gustave Le Bon, most research and literature are of recent origin. The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines a mass gathering as “more than a specified number of persons (starting from >1,000) at a specific location for a specific purpose for a defined period of time.”

According to the Ngai Search Method (based on research by KM Ngai, Edbert Hsu and others), 350 stampedes have occurred between 1980 and 2012, resulting in 10,243 deaths and 22,445 injuries.

South Asia and Africa make up more than half of all crowd disasters, with a fatality rate that is eight times higher than in the developed world.

India has seen some of the biggest agglomerations of people and some of the worst disasters. In 2011, 109 people died at Sabarimala; in 2010, at the Ram Janki temple in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, 63 died; and at the 1954 Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 800 people lost their lives. Just last weekend, at the Jagannath Yatra in Puri, Orissa, two women died and 20 were injured.

At the ongoing Kumbh Mela in Nashik, crowds of over one crore are expected; at the Godavari Pushkaralu, the number has already crossed three crore. Religious gatherings account for 79 per cent of the total number of stampedes in the country.

The smallest unit

In May, roughly two months ahead of the Pushkaralu, researcher Faisel Illiyas, who works at the Institute of Land and Disaster Management, held a five-day workshop for officers in crowd management. A group of 30-35 officials learned the science behind crowd control: how does the crowd behave, how does it circulate in designated sites, and how to plan for crowd density. “But I’m not sure if those guidelines were followed,” says Illiyas, when asked for an assessment of the Godavari stampede.

“They’ve spent ₹1,000 crore on infrastructure development, but I have seen nothing specifically designed for the safety of the crowd.”

In his 2013 paper ‘Human Stampedes During Religious Festivals: A comparative review of Mass Gathering Emergencies in India’, which he co-authored with other researchers, Illiyas documents seven reasons for crowd disturbances. What occurred at Kotagummam can be described as a “beginning-of event-surge”.

Like the thrill of watching the first-day-first-show of a film, devotees believe that the first dip on the first day at the most important ghat to be more propitious.

Often, the behaviour of the crowd is driven by its smallest unit — the individual. “It takes just one or two persons to create a stampede,” says Illiyas.

In ‘Crush Point’, published in The New Yorker in 2011, author John Seabrook writes that humans may not be as evolved as colonies of ants or schools of fish, which can communicate through pheromones across a swarm.

But does the crowd think less intelligently than an individual? Are crowd reactions disproportionate to the emergency at hand? Do positive social relations prevail in stampede conditions? Illiyas says the crowd thinks irrationally and aggressively: “(At the Godavari Pushkaralu) every individual wants to take a dip, immediately, and before the others. When trapped, everyone wants to escape, perhaps even at the cost of others’ safety.”

Bring up the bodies

Twenty one of the 27 dead at Kotagummam were women. Eighty per cent of the injured were also women. Physically more vulnerable, the elderly and women usually make up most of the body count. “It is interesting to note that in Sabarimala, an all-male gathering, 109 people died. At Attukal Pongala however, an all-female event in Thiruvananthapuram, there have been no casualties. Again in mixed gatherings, women are more unsafe.”

Scan the images of the casualties, and you will find that many of them were missing their footwear. Their clothes were in disarray; pallus, chunnis and shirts knocked out of place. Mouths hanging open, they gasped for air, before dying of suffocation. In a 1993 paper titled ‘The Causes and Prevention of Crowd Disasters’, John Fruin, founder of crowdsafe.com, writes, “People may be literally lifted out of their shoes, and have clothing torn off. Intense crowd pressures, exacerbated by anxiety, make it difficult to breathe.” The pressure generated by crowds in a stampede is so high (up to 4,500N/m) that it takes only seven people to bend a steel railing out of shape.

It took months of planning and multiple agencies — municipalities, state government departments, and state disaster management agencies — to plan an event of this size and scale. More than 30,000 personnel were deployed, 423 medical camps set up, 2,000 special buses and 25 trains provided, and 10 lakh packets of food and water handed out daily.

The 180 ghats were classified into A, B and C categories depending on their size, the crowd expected and the personnel stationed.

(A category A ghat, like the one at Kotagummam, can accommodate one lakh people, category B, 50,000 and so on.) “We have crowd management in place, the event is proceeding according to plan, there is no pressure,” says H Arun Kumar, district collector of East Godavari.

Yet, things have gone wrong. Visitors say water is in short supply, skin infections are on the rise, and Rajahmundry is ill-equipped to host tourists. Despite designating the 200m-long Saraswathi ghat for VIPs, Naidu chose to visit the Pushkar ghat, setting off the crowd collapse.

While political parties hold the Andhra Pradesh CM responsible, for once the crowd is not entirely to blame.

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