FATAL CROWD MISMANAGEMENT – NO END!

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FATAL CROWD MISMANAGEMENT – NO END!

And now it is Mahakumbha! In the land of the crowd, crowd management should have come to police forces and the governance mechanism is a natural manner. This expectation remains belied and the issue keeps surfacing in one form or the other. To call it endemic would not be out of place. We have had a series of them in the recent past, what lessons have been learned from them, no one knows. At least the change cannot be seen in the subsequent crowd management exercises. In July 2024 Hathras Satsang Stampede took over a hundred lives, followed by crowd mismanagement at Chennai Air Display, followed by Kerala Temple Stampede and then of a different kind at Sandhya Theatre in Hyderabad.

The way people gather tragedy after tragedy gives us a feeling that they have accepted this fact. The quality of policing and their agility, swiftness and expertise is in full display in the regular policing in any state. Their instantaneous transformation to specialised force which would pull off crowd management of the largest gathering on planet earth, seems to be a tall expectation. Very few in leadership have handled crowds of this nature and that too for days together. In the current situation without the infusion of technology, no crowd management can happen. The organisers and the law enforcement personnel all realise this very well.

With all financial resources at their command, there was no dearth of CCTVs, other gadgets, software, AI, command centers and what not. But did it all add up into a tech ecosystem supporting the police, with regulatory information and actionable intelligence in a dynamic and real time manners, to elevate policing to the requirements of this maha security arrangements is certainly questionable. That apart does the physical infrastructure support that sort of crowd; the transportation hubs, roads, parking, accommodation and at times the physical space itself. No one knows of the unity of command of the multiple police and other agencies working in tandem.

The Maha Media Blitzkrieg added to the misery. It was made to believe that heaven on earth has been created, and that it would take care of all requirements of any number of people, when that was not the case. Possibly, that can never become the case. How much was the Mahakumbha management aware of granular details of the quantum and nature of the crowd and its movement, sufficient enough to regulate it as per the requirement of the smooth operation of this festival is a billion dollar question. Additionally, it needed that capability too. The VVIP protocol, the VIP passes, lack of access routes at times, unauthorised tents too, have all added to the exacerbating situation. New stringent restrictions in the wake of the stampede are likely to improve the quality and the outcome of crowd management.

NO GRANDSTANDING CAN PULL OFF AN EVENT OF THIS NATURE, LOOPHOLES ARE FOUND TO EMERGE, SIGNALLING OUR NEMESIS.
Sanjay Sahay

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