Back-To-Back Stampedes In Haridwar And Barabanki Raise Alarms Over India's Crowd Management Failures

Two deadly back-to-back stampedes in north India at religious events in the past few days in Haridwar and Barabanki pose the troubling question of how prepared India is to manage sudden crowd surges. The crush at Haridwar took the lives of at least eight people at the Mansa Devi temple, while two people died at the Avsaaneshwar temple in Barabanki.

In both instances, there was panic triggered by a rumour of electrocution in the former, and the collapse of electrical wires onto a tin shed in the latter was caused by monkeys.

These incidents may seem small compared to the large-scale mortality at the ghastly stampede at a satsang convened by Bhole Baba in Hathras, UP, in July 2024, in which 121 people lost their lives, but are part of a disturbingly frequent trend of unmanageable crowding at religious events. Since these are often organised in remote locations, there is little infrastructure or official supervision.

Religious gatherings seem to fall into a legal grey zone, with perfunctory permissions being issued by police for a specified crowd number, but no effective enforcement authority under law.

The primary legal foundation to regulate such gatherings continues to be the BNS penal code, with the police specifying the maximum allowable size of the attendees and responsibility of organisers centred around negligence or culpability; the Disaster Management Act incorporates provisions giving discretion to the forces to respond to such catastrophic events using urgent procurement and logistics powers.

Yet, given the repeated crowd crushes that are witnessed, with several fatalities, the question of new legal protocol for regulation poses itself with great urgency.

In the Hathras stampede, the maximum permitted crowd was of the order of 80,000, but the actual number who turned up for the satsang was three times higher. Even in a prosperous temple set-up such as Tirupati, the distribution of tickets for Vaikunta Ekadasi set off a fatal crush.

Evidently, the authorities need a protocol that places one agency in charge of all gatherings, whether religious or connected with sports, music, and politics. Insulating it from political pressures and requiring it to outline its protocol clearly to the public to help overcome cultural resistance to regulation is vital.

Impromptu gatherings, such as railway station crowds and linked stampedes, seen in Mumbai in 2017 and New Delhi earlier this year, will continue to pose a challenge. After all, India is the most populous country with rapid, unplanned urbanisation.

2 Killed, 38 Injured In Electrocution & Stampede During Sawan Rituals At Avsaneshwar Temple In UP’s Barabanki

It may be time, therefore, for the Union government to go back to the drawing board to draft a comprehensive crowd regulation law that brings all agencies on the same platform. This has to be a professional exercise that leads to a transparent protocol, which is easily understood by police, fire, health, and disaster management authorities and enforced without fear or favour.