116 people die in one of India’s worst mass panics

At least 116 people were killed in a stampede outside a Hindu preacher’s gathering in the northern Indian city of Hathras on Tuesday, according to a senior police officer responsible for the region.

While the official investigation into the cause is still ongoing, there are two versions of events.

Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the state where the stampede took place, said it began after a group of believers were prevented by organizers from approaching the preacher.

Meanwhile, district administrator Ashish Kumar said the incident occurred towards the end of the event when people tried to escape the heat and humidity in the makeshift tent where the gathering was taking place.

Until Tuesday evening local time Videos on social media showed bodies lying outside a local hospital. Some eyewitnesses told local media that the stampede was exacerbated by a lack of crowd control at exits to the main road.

According to the Associated Press, 15,000 people attended the event, although only 5,000 were allowed. Another eyewitness quoted by Reuters said there were 50,000 participants.

The government has announced compensation of the equivalent of $2,500 for the families of the deceased. Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences to the victims. In parliament, opposition leaders said the responsibility for the tragedy lies with the government.

The mass panic was the latest tragedy of its kind in India

In India, mass panics at religious gatherings have been occurring for some time, often because security measures are not adequately observed. One of the worst incidents in recent years occurred in 2013, when the railing of a concrete bridge leading to a pilgrimage town in central India collapsed. 115 people died and over 100 were injured.

The following year, India’s disaster management agency issued a set of guidelines to prevent stampedes, recommending that the government and private organizers take measures such as putting up route maps, installing surveillance cameras, regulating traffic and setting up emergency medical camps.

Janki Andharia, a professor at the School of Disaster Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, says implementation of the guidelines is patchy.

“Some pilgrimage hotspots like Amarnath Temple (in the Himalayas) and Tirupati Temple (in southern India) have robust crowd management systems in place,” she says. “But these are not implemented consistently. And there is little cross-learning.”

Between 2005 and 2015, India experienced stampedes at religious sites that left hundreds of people dead, but government records show that number appears to have decreased.

Before Tuesday’s stampede, the last fatal incident of this kind had occurred in 2022, when at least 12 people died after a huge crowd of devotees attempted to enter the Vaishno Devi shrine in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Andharia warns against taking the apparent reduction in death rates at face value. “Deaths due to stampede are often underreported,” she says. “Unfortunately, human life is rarely valued in our country.”

Copyright: NPR