The headlines have become a grim liturgy: a stampede at a temple festival, a crush at a cricket celebration, deaths at a political rally, or a devastating rush on a railway platform. Precious human lives lost each time, of innocents participating in routine activities. Why do we live with this numbingly repeated horror?
Each incident, whether it is the tragedy that struck a film star's political rally in Karur, or the chaos that unfolded during the RCB cricket team's celebration in Bengaluru, is met with the same sequence: shock, immediate blame-game , government compensation, and a quickly forgotten judicial inquiry. We classify these horrific events as "accidents", yet their predictability is the cruellest element of the cycle.
These are not accidents of fate; they are the fatal consequences of a profound and persistent deficit in our public safety culture. India's inability to manage its mass gatherings - be they religious, political, or social - is a social and governance failure, exposing a national disregard for the value of a single human life when measured against the spectacle of a crowd. I am not playing politics here: both national and state governments, and political parties of every hue, have been culpable at different times.
The Anatomy Of A Systemic Failure
To understand why scores of lives are lost year after year, we must look beyond the immediate trigger - the rumour, the sudden trip or fall, the narrow passage - and identify the three systemic failures that act as preconditions for disaster.
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First, there is the failure of physical infrastructure. Analysis shows that narrow passages and bottlenecks are primary structural causes, contributing to a significant percentage of fatalities. Many of India's most revered pilgrimage sites and urban hubs were built centuries ago, never designed to handle modern crowd densities exceeding five persons per square metre. Adding to this, temporary venues for rallies and festivals often feature hastily erected, weak barricades and inadequate, single-point entry and exit routes. When a crowd is funnelled into a choke point - be it a temple queue or a railway footbridge - it transforms human beings from individuals into a fluid mass, and any small perturbation can turn that flow into a deadly, unmanageable pressure wave. It's astonishing that our authorities repeatedly grant permission for large crowds in such manifestly unsuitable places.
Misplaced Priorities
Secondly, the failure of administration and planning is rampant. India's National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) issued comprehensive guidelines in 2014, detailing norms for crowd flow, risk assessment, and site management. Yet, these guidelines are routinely ignored. Event organisers and local authorities frequently claim to be surprised by the actual numbers, claiming they underestimated the likely attendance figures. In the political sphere, the priority is often the visual display of support, leading to misplaced priorities where the safe movement of the crowd is sacrificed for VIP movement or maximum visibility. If you talk frankly to IAS and IPS officers, they will tell you that there is a deep-seated lack of inter-agency coordination; police, fire, medical teams, and civic bodies rarely operate from a shared, real-time command structure, leading to delayed responses that turn injuries into fatalities.
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Finally, there is a failure of public safety culture. While authorities are chiefly responsible, the culture of "rushing ahead" or ignoring advisories, fuelled by intense devotion or hero-worship, turns a dense crowd into an uncontrollable and often volatile one. In religious gatherings, which account for over 60% of all stampede fatalities, emotions run high, making crowds psychologically harder to manage. The public, often lacking basic awareness of safe crowd behaviour, may panic at a rumour or surge for a mere glimpse of a deity or leader, triggering the catastrophic pressure that causes compressive asphyxia - the leading cause of death in crowd crushes.
The Cost of Institutional Amnesia
What sets India apart is not the fact of these disasters, but their recurrence - a sign of weak institutional learning. When a crowd crush occurred at a Halloween festival in South Korea in 2022, it led to massive, systemic reforms in public safety protocols worldwide. In India, the inquiry reports from one tragedy - be it the 2013 Ratangarh temple incident or the recent Karur political rally disaster - are typically shelved, gathering dust until the next one occurs.
This institutional amnesia is compounded by a lack of legal accountability. While the Disaster Management Act exists, the swift, non-partisan prosecution of organisers, negligent officials, and complicit bodies remains rare. Without penal provisions that bite, the incentive structure for proactive prevention simply does not exist. It remains cheaper to pay compensation after a disaster than to invest in the scientific, technological, and infrastructure upgrades required to prevent it.
Forging a New Safety Architecture
Ending this cycle of grief requires a structural and cultural reset, built on three mandatory pillars of reform that I advocated in interviews after the Karur tragedy:
1. Codify Accountability with a National Crowd Safety Act: India needs a dedicated, comprehensive law - a Crowd Safety Act - that goes beyond existing statutes. This Act must clearly define the liability of every stakeholder, from the event organiser (religious trusts, political parties, sports bodies) to the local district magistrate. It must mandate third-party, independent safety audits for all gatherings exceeding a defined threshold. Crucially, the law must include strict penal provisions, including imprisonment and hefty fines, for gross negligence, ensuring that organisers are financially and legally motivated to prioritise safety.
2. Adopt Scientific Crowd Management: The age of simply deploying more police with lathis or tear-gas is over. Safety must be technological. We must immediately integrate real-time AI and drone surveillance with ground monitoring systems to detect crowd density, especially at critical choke points, flagging risks when density approaches the danger zone of five persons per square metre. Learning from global best practices, such as the successful GIS mapping used at the Kumbh Mela and the one-way flow designs used at the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, should be adopted nationwide. Furthermore, cities must integrate crowd management into urban planning, ensuring that new infrastructure, including railway stations and public venue designs, incorporates multiple, wide, and clearly marked evacuation routes.
3. Cultivate a Culture of Public Safety: Finally, prevention requires the public to be an active partner. The government, through the NDMA, must launch sustained, multi-lingual public awareness campaigns using digital and traditional media to educate citizens on safe crowd behaviour. This includes training volunteers and security personnel in "crowd whispering" techniques to calmly de-escalate tension. More importantly, it means teaching individuals simple self-protection techniques: how to keep forearms across the chest to protect the breathing space from compressive forces, and how to move diagonally toward less dense edges. Safety cannot be a government mandate alone; it must become a non-negotiable public consciousness.
The lives lost in these tragic, recurring incidents are a damning indictment of our system - one that sadly views crowd management as a last-minute policing exercise rather than a fundamental prerequisite of governance.
The challenge is immense, but the solution is clear: move beyond reactive mourning and implement a robust, legally-backed, and technologically integrated culture of crowd safety. Only then can we guarantee that India's vibrant, energetic tradition of mass gatherings becomes a source of collective pride, rather than repeated tragedy.
(Shashi Tharoor has been a Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He is an author and a former diplomat.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
