India rapidly becoming a hot spot for accidents involving crowds: Study

India is increasingly becoming a hot spot for crowd accidents, with religious festivals emerging as the most likely situation to result in a dangerous crush, a study says.

Researchers have compiled the most comprehensive database of deaths and injuries caused by accidents caused by crowds which they hope will improve safety at mass gatherings across the world.

The directory details 281 major global incidents between 1900 and 2019 that resulted in at least one death or 10 people being injured.

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“India and, to a somewhat lesser extent, West Africa appear to be hot spots for crowd accidents,” said Milad Haghani from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia.

“These are rapidly developing regions, with a quick increase in population and where infrastructure is struggling to keep pace with the inflow of people from rural to urban areas.

“Northern India, in particular, is a densely populated area with solid religious traditions leading people to gather in millions over short period of times,” Haghani said in a statement.

Religious events

The study, published in the journal Safety Science, found that almost 70 per cent of the accidents in India between 2000 and 2019 were related to religious events.

Many of these happened close to rivers or in areas near water.

Accidents have also occurred on bridges at ferry terminals or on riverbanks where people enter the water to later reverse their direction, creating a complex and conflicting motion pattern.

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Train stations or transportation terminals have also often been the theatre for disasters in the region, the researchers said.

“I think the problems we see from the data in India, where there are a large number of accidents linked to religious festivals, is mostly about financial constraints,” Haghani said.

Apart from India, the other areas where numerous deadly incidents have occurred in the past few years include South-East Asia and the Middle East.

“Just in the past 20 years alone, around 8,000 people have been killed in crowd accidents and more than 15,000 have been injured,” Haghani said.

(With agency inputs)