Culture of risk: on safety and a mass gathering

A day apart, two pilgrimages in North India have endured chaos. Eight people died on the steep stairway to Haridwar’s Mansa Devi shrine on July 27 after a rumour spread that a snapped power line was live. The next day, at Avsaaneshwar temple in Barabanki, monkeys reportedly damaged an overhead cable, sparking panic that killed two persons. Both incidents were triggered by fears of electrocution. Such hazards at temples are not new: makeshift wiring draped over stalls and overloaded transformers are common sights at melas. However, neither shrine had an automatic power cutoff or a public-address system capable of debunking misinformation. The Haridwar probe will almost certainly reiterate older recommendations such as underground cabling and real-time voltage monitoring. However, the threat is incidental. Except for two major stampedes in recent memory (in Bengaluru and Hyderabad), all such tragedies have occurred at religious mass gatherings or in the course of attending them. They occur despite multiple guidelines and court orders due to authorities’ collective desensitisation to risk. On paper, Uttarakhand has a crowd-management manual for the Char Dham and the NDMA’s guidelines say that every event must calculate carrying capacity, stagger entry, maintain redundant escape routes, and hold drills. Yet, at Mansa Devi, the stairway that doubles as entry and exit was used without scheduling, and the only alternative route had much lower carrying capacity.

In Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, the response centred on compensation rather than structural reform. The NDMA norms need to be legally binding, with severe consequences for persons, enterprises or businesses that fail to protect lives. At present, States choose provisions from the norms and temple trusts often treat them as optional because pilgrim facilities fall under charitable exemptions in many building codes. Routine ‘darshan’ does not require safety certification even when daily footfall exceeds that of a sports stadium. States also bank on ad hoc volunteers and under-trained guards to manage surges. However, annual drills mandated under the Disaster Management Act are rarely held for regular worship, while funds earmarked for permanent infrastructure are often diverted to festivals. The time has come to eradicate the notion of a simply planned or cheap mass gathering event, religious or otherwise. When footfall exceeds a preset threshold, a single incident-command structure must come into effect. Authorities must deploy overhead LiDAR and AI cameras to calculate crowd density, with real-time alerts to help divert or throttle traffic. Finally, States must ensure that venues publish capacity charts at entrances, conduct and livestream quarterly drills to normalise a safety culture, and certify volunteers in basic life support and crowd psychology.