The Lethal Panic

Even days after a stampede that killed 18 people at New Delhi railway station, it is still not certain how exactly it happened. According to media reports, several factors came together. There was a huge throng for the Kumbh Mela and the railway station was extraordinarily crowded. If the trains had run with clocklike precision then maybe the distribution of passengers would have lightened. But one train, the Prayagraj Express, was confused for a special train for the Kumbh with the same first name. It was in a different platform and passengers rushed towards it over the bridge. Making matters worse, other trains had been delayed and those waiting for it added to the crowd swell. As the mass of people shuffled along, something happened triggering the panic that ledg to the deaths. The railways cite an ongoing probe that will clarify the causes but the report will take its time.

India has a particular problem with stampedes. The Kumbh Mela has a history of it. In 1954, one stampede might have killed as many as 800 pilgrims in Prayagraj. This year, on January 29, at least 30 people were killed in a stampede in the same city. In 1986, it was the Haridwar Kumbh which saw a stampede claim the lives of 200 people. In 2003, more than 30 people died at the Nashik Kumbh.

Ten years later at Prayagraj [then Allahabad] railway station, a stampede claimed 42 lives during the Kumbh. A research paper by Harvard University that studied the incident then indicates an eerie similarity to what might have happened in Delhi last week. The trains were delayed then too. There was already a huge rush because of the festival and the numbers began to build up inside the station. And then, just as what is said to have happened in Delhi, a change of platforms was announced. The paper said, "By 6:30 PM, rail officials reported that, 'all foot-over-bridges were jampacked. The travellers' sheds installed at the entry of the station through platform number one were also chock-a-block and people were waiting for their trains at the platforms…. [T]here was little idea about which passenger on which platform wanted to go where.' Only a fraction of the promised extra trains had reached Allahabad railway station by early evening. Suddenly, for reasons that remain unclear, a track change was announced just as the Rajdhani Express was pulling into the station. The train arrived not on Platform 1 but on Platform 6. To reach Platform 6, passengers would need to cross over at least one station track, climbing a set of stairs within the station and crossing a narrow footbridge."

The overwhelming majority of stampedes that happen in India are during religious events. There is no mystery in this because festivals are egalitarian and Indians of all classes and castes participate in them. Kumbh is the biggest of such festivals. In 2013, the September issue of the published a paper on a study which looked at stampedes in India and did a comprehensive analysis. They looked at 50 years of stampedes during political, religious and entertainment events. Religious events accounted for as much as 79 per cent of the tragedies. There are risk management strategies that exist to mitigate stampedes, but they get drowned out by the sheer scale of numbers in India. Also, even the events have become bigger both in terms of population and geographical spread with every successive iteration making planning difficult. It takes just one small trigger for a stampede to unspool, ranging from a minor accident, a rumour, deliberate design or lack of precaution. The 2024 tragedy in Hathras, which claimed more than 100 lives, exemplifies organisers not appreciating the risk of what could happen. A spiritual leader named Bhole Baba organised a gathering and the numbers expected were about 80,000. As many as 250,000 turned up. After the event was over, as he exited, followers rushed to get his blessings and it spiralled out of control with people being trampled.

In the stampede that killed six people in Tirupati last month, it was a misunderstanding even though the temple had processes for crowd control. Thousands of devotees had gathered to purchase tickets for a special auspicious day. The gate was opened for a woman, who was feeling unwell, to be let out. Those waiting outside mistook it as the signal to go inside and there was then the chaos and panic.

Deaths in stampedes are not necessarily by trampling. The biggest cause is asphyxiation. On its website, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNODRR) has a page on stampedes where it is is defined as a surge by individuals in a crowd because of a perception of danger, which then leads to irrational movement for self-preservation, the paradox being that then leads to imminent danger. UNODRR lists the ways in which death can happen, "Although survivors of human stampedes and autopsy reports suggest traumatic asphyxia as the primary cause of death, other mechanisms have been considered, including myocardial infarction, direct crushing injury to intrathoracic or intraabdominal organs, head injury, and neck compression. All these mechanisms are possible; however, little actual supportive evidence exists." But what is unexpected is that death might happen not when people are down but standing. It says, "It has been concluded from autopsy findings that 'people who succumb in these scenarios typically die (standing up) in a vertical position' due to compression force and 'do not collapse to the floor until after the crowd density and pressure have been relieved. Compressive forces applied front to back or vice versa resulted in ventilatory failure, whereas those experiencing compressive forces from side to side were spared, presumably because chest expansion was not compromised to the same extent'".

The safest strategy for an individual when caught in a stampede is to move with the crowd and not against it, try to keep breathing space around, while also using his or her hands to form a barrier against the body being squeezed in. Because women and children are generally not as strong as men, the danger of fatalities to them is considerably greater.

A stampede by its very nature is a result of disorder. Does that make it impossible to predict? Not necessarily. Just two weeks ago, one of the world's leading scientific journals published a paper titled 'Emergence of collective oscillations in massive human crowds'. It dealt with the pattern of stampedes. The researchers sought to analyse the crowd's movement before a stampede. This they did by looking at video footage of the San Fermin festival in Spain, which has always witnessed extraordinary crowds, over several years. They noticed that the crowd, even as it got denser, at one point seemed to move in a particular manner of small oscillations. Then they applied the findings to look at the footage of a real stampede in Germany in 2010. They found that just before the actual stampede, these oscillations occurred there too. "Through a combination of experimental measurements and theory, our findings show how collective chiral oscillations can spontaneously animate dense crowds in the absence of external stimuli," said the paper. Therefore, if you monitor a crowd and notice these oscillations begin, then something could be done at that point to prevent the stampede.

The researcher of the paper, Denis Bartolo, a physicist, was interviewed by the which wrote, "As a safety precaution, Dr. Bartolo suggests monitoring densely packed crowds for these orbital motions. Detecting them can offer advance warning of the emergence of dangerous and uncontrolled movements. By catching oscillations when they're small, he says event organizers could ask the crowd to disperse, or stand still, before the orbits grow in size and lead to people being crushed or trampled."

Studies like these, even if true, are difficult to implement in the conditions that exist in India—like lack of infrastructure or training in disaster mitigation. After the New Delhi railway station stampede, the government is mooting a plan for holding areas outside 60 stations to prevent overcrowding. But that might move the overcrowding from inside the station to outside. Also, anyone who has travelled in Mumbai suburban trains in peak hours knows that the narrow staircases are waiting disasters and to have holding areas would mean commuting can't happen in any practical way because office goers need to reach on time daily. People have been travelling in crushing conditions inside Mumbai's suburban trains for decades, precisely for that reason. This stampede might have happened in the station but it is not just a Railways problem. Any pragmatic solution for stampedes would have to span the breadth of the country and the different ways in which they happen.