Many of India’s temple tragedies have been attributed to poor crowd management on the part of the local authorities. The New Sunday Express picked 20 important temples where these incidents have not been heard of. Our bureaus checked these places of worship for their preparedness, but we have featured only 12 of them here. Temples such as Akshardham (Ahmedabad), Sreenathji, Nathdwara (Rajasthan), Vaidyanath (Deoghar, Jharkhand), Ramantha Swamy, Rameswaram (Tamil Nadu), Srikrishna, Udupi (Karnataka), Padmanabhaswamy (Thiruvananthapuram), Sri Ranganathaswamy, Srirangam (Tamil Nadu) and Kalighat Kali (Kolkata) appear to have their effective crowd management apparatus in place. Experts are of the opinion that the temples have to make sure that the infrastructure (roads, corridors, open spaces, entrances and exits) is suitable for the mass gathering. It should be checked if there is enough capacity and there are no bottlenecks. Besides, a good crowd management plan, which includes monitoring, scheduling and control, must be followed. The preparedness, according to experts, must include good contingency plans (e.g. evacuation) in case anything goes wrong. They advise to make use of modern technology to be able to take action in case the event does not unfold according to plan. God willing. |