
Thousands of pilgrims were crushed under a moonless winter sky in the wee hours of Wednesday at Prayagraj. The official toll from the stampede has not moved from 30, but reports indicate the actual number is much higher; hundreds were injured. It’s a terrible tragedy at an event lauded—including by us—for efficiently steering the world’s largest crowd. However, going by the lack of proof that past lessons have been assimilated, there is no assurance it would not happen again.
Prayagraj is unique among the four Kumbh venues because a massive tent city the size of 7,500 football fields has to come up on the sandy confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna every time it’s held. In contrast, the riverbanks at Haridwar, Nashik and Ujjain are more built up and accommodate fewer visitors. It’s no surprise that the modern era’s worst stampede happened at Prayagraj in 1954; its official toll is contested by some local elders even today. In the following editions, experienced bureaucrats put together a crowd control plan, which the top IPS and IAS officers picked to run the fair are supposed to revisit. But infuriatingly, the triggers for the 1954 and 2025 stampedes were, basically, the same—the laity inexorably moving towards the water broke their columns.
One of the main lessons from 1954 was to ensure unidirectional crowds and a healthy distance between the herded commonfolk and the irascible Naga sadhus, who are given the right of way to the most coveted stretch of water. Estimating the crowd size in advance was another recommendation. While it used to be collated from police reports from the entry points to Prayagraj, the task is made easier today with mass location data from mobile phones. So when administrators are saying they did not expect 8 crore people to turn up on the auspicious Mauni Amavasya, they are being disingenuous—it’s their job to know.
This Kumbh is being held under the watch of Yogi Adityanath, who said before the fair began that earlier administrations had allowed stampedes to happen; before long, karma came back to bite him. The new plans, including broadening the bathing area and dividing the fair ground into more manageable sectors, should have already been implemented. What we expect from the administration now is an honest count of the dead. Without that, those who perished would not find the one thing they craved for—absolution.