India: Could Maha Kumbh Mela stampede have been prevented?

At least 40 people were killed, and hundreds more injured, in the early hours of Wednesday when a stampede broke out at Maha Kumbh Mela, the world's largest religious festival that attracts millions of people to Prayagraj, a city in northern India. 

Pandemonium broke loose when pilgrims began pushing towards the confluence of the sacred Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati rivers to take a holy bath that devotees believe washes away sins and frees them from the cycle of rebirth.

Eyewitnesses told DW that barricades were breached, and people kept tripping over one another as thousands trampled over others trying to escape to safety on the riverbank.

"It was around 1.45 a.m., and people were getting flattened in the melee, and I could see this crush of humanity surge forward. Many women and children were asleep when the tragedy happened," Saurabh Singh, a festival attendee, told DW. 

"I was numb seeing such a crowd, and an hour later, I saw lifeless bodies lying on the ground." 

Indra Shekhar, who has been camping at the festival for over a week, visited the scene soon after the stampede and saw hundreds of people being taken away in stretchers as waiting ambulances rushed the seriously injured to hospitals. 

"This tragedy could have been easily avoided if there was better crowd control and the presence of adequate police. But the administration blocked over 28 platoon bridges leading to the river, which were reserved for VIPs, leading to the chaos," Shekar told DW.  

Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of the northern Uttar Pradesh state where the event occurred, said the stampede broke out when pilgrims tried to jump over police barricades to reach the Sangam confluence.

History of crowd problems at religious festivals

The "Kumbh Mela" festival is held every 12 years, corresponding to a full orbital cycle of Jupiter. Different iterations of the festival occur at different locations and dates. However, this year's festival marks a once-in-144 year event, called a "Maha" (grand) Kumbh Mela, making it more significant. 

The dangers posed by huge crowds has been a problem in earlier festivals.

At the 2013 Kumbh, at least 40 people were killed in a stampede at a train station in Prayagraj.

In July 2024, over 120 people died during another religious gathering led by a self-styled godman in India's northern town of Hathras. Over 250,000 are estimated to have attended the event. 

The crowd reportedly started to stampede when the godman's security detail pushed followers who had knelt to collect the mud upon which the religious leader had walked.

Stampedes at religious festivals occur due to large, moving crowds combined with limited crowd control measures.

"In almost all religious stampedes, overcrowding, poor crowd management and rumors and panic have resulted in horrific tragedies," a senior official at Black Tiger Security Services told DW anonymously.

What measures were in place?

The deadly stampede at Maha Kumbh Mela has raised fresh concerns over crowd control at religious gatherings. 

Knowing there would be an estimated 400-450 million attendees over the six-week-long festival, authorities have deployed over 2,700 CCTV cameras, with over 300 equipped with AI capabilities, to monitor crowd density and movement patterns in real time.

Drones have been deployed to oversee the massive gathering of devotees to give officials an idea of when density thresholds of people are exceeded at various points on the festival grounds.

In addition, over 40,000 police officers are on-site to maintain order and manage crowds. They are supported by a command center that oversees operations using real-time data from surveillance systems. 

What could have been done differently?

However, even with these measures, crowd control still fell apart.

"This technology, even AI, has not enabled authorities to manage crowds effectively and prevent overcrowding given that India has seen many stampedes in religious gatherings," Yashovardhan Azad, a former police officer, told DW. 

"Clearly, it has not helped, and there should be new thinking and approaches to handle crowds of this nature."

At this festival, devotees also received wristbands for real-time tracking, which aids in locating individuals if they go missing and enhances overall safety. 

Anna Sieben, an associate professor of cultural and social psychology at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, who has been researching crowd dynamics for years, pointed out that people who find themselves in a stampede often do not realize anything is wrong until it is too late.

Dirk Helbing, a professor of computational social science at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, has attributed the stampedes to a phenomenon called "crowd turbulence."

This happens when many people move into a space where there is little room to move and a high density of people and where people are squeezed in between each other. 

"This precisely is what may have happened in the Kumbh. Danger always lurks in such huge congregations. That is why even a rumor can lead to stampedes, and people are unaware of what caused it," said Azad.  

Edited by: Wesley Rahn