Crowd management: The magical remedy?

The recent stampedes at Maha Kumbh in Prayagraj and at the railway station in New Delhi have once again put the focus on the issue of crowd management in our country, particularly in the context of religious events.

There is no single all-pervasive tool to deal with the issue of crowd management, and it will finally depend on the situation on the ground. But, one thing is for sure: the adage “where there is a will, there is a way” holds true.

What it means is that any crowd management ultimately depends on the will of the persons who have been assigned the responsibility of this act. This can be better understood from a small example. Suppose a chief minister suddenly decides to attend a hitherto unscheduled event, then the Police administration would certainly manage to get his wish fulfilled, whatever efforts it may need, for the simple reason that they cannot afford not to do so.

But the same Police Administration does not take the crowd control of common people at New Delhi railway station or Mahakumbh with the same seriousness because it feels that the stakes here are much lower and the consequences, if any, can be easily managed.

The position would be entirely different if every incidence of stampede during any crowd management event, with or without death, is necessarily considered an act of administrative and criminal negligence, and the responsible officers are immediately put under suspension and an FIR suo-motu gets registered in the concerned Police station. If this small drill is installed in the administrative system, the situation would change completely, because the concerned officers can no longer take the matter casually.

One can equate this with the mechanism of change of burden of proof introduced in many criminal offences. Though this change in the criminal justice system might be debatable, the fact remains that this shift in burden is considered by many as an extremely important tool to deliver justice in criminal cases, where the accused are felt to have improper advantage of the currently prevailing presumption of innocence.

In the same vein, it seems necessary to shift the presumption of the officers involved in the process of crowd management, from being innocent to being guilty on administrative and criminal front, in all cases of stampede. This single act alone might prove to be the game changer, making the concerned officers take and feel their responsibility with the required seriousness.

Such an assumption would neither be arbitrary nor draconian or whimsical, but would be near to reality, because as stated above, one of the primary reasons for any crowd management failure is undue laxity and casualness in duty. Otherwise, if the concerned officers are vigilant and if they take their job with the required seriousness, they will not only take all the required precautionary steps, including procuring the required manpower and infrastructural support, much ahead of the given event but would also be able to deal with any unexpected surge of masses. This is because each human being is a separate entity and they come to any place one by one unlike a floodgate of water rushing from a broken dam. Hence human beings can almost always be monitored, controlled and regulated in the required manner, if not at the actual point of strain, then at places away from there.

Summing it up, to the best of my understanding, proper accountability made inbuilt in the system, might turn out to be the much-needed elixir for crowd management.

(The writer is a retired IPS officer)