IIM study to help fight Madhya Pradesh like stampede

NEW DELHI: While minimum casualties were ensured when cyclone Phailin hit Odisha on October 12, the country was left shocked when the very next day, 115 people lost their lives in a stampede at a Madhya Pradesh temple.

Waking up to what has perhaps been the biggest killer of human lives in recurring accidents at the country’s religious shrines, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has finally got a study conducted from the Indian Institute of Management ( IIM), Ahmedabad on how to stop such incidents in future. Seven major stampedes since 2005, six of which were at religious shrines, have claimed over 1,000 lives. Two IIM-A professors, Chetan Soman and Sachin Jayaswal, have now submitted to NDMA a paper on ‘Crowd Management at Places of Mass Gathering’ which the NDMA plans to transform into a detailed set of guidelines to be circulated to all state governments and disaster management agencies for emulation.

The IIM-A study has suggested that prior registration of devotees should be made compulsory for all major religious shrines, modern techniques like online registration and RFID tags for pilgrims should be opted for controlling entry of pilgrims to the venue and liability insurance for the pilgrims must be made compulsory at the end of the venue management body which may also be held liable for human disasters at their venues.

The study also points out that all the recent incidents of crowd disaster in India were mostly manmade and could have been completely prevented with proactive and holistic planning.

The IIM-A professors visited various places of mass gathering, especially, religious places. “A majority of the crowd disasters in India have occurred at religious places while stadia, venues of music concerts, night clubs and shopping malls have been the typical places of disasters in the developed countries,” the study says, pointing out that the locations of Indian shrines have played some role in crowd disasters. “Majority of the Hindu shrines in India have the following characteristics -- located atop hills or mountains with difficult terrain, mostly narrow, winding uphill pathways along steep hillsides and access routes are prone to landslides and other natural dangers.