The recent stampede in the Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh that left over 150 people dead and 230 injured ought to serve as a wakeup call lo put in place safety measures   to prevent such avoidable mishaps. The incident occurred when a rain shelter on the mountain path near the temple collapsed which reportedly triggered rumors of a landslide. Consequently, panic-stricken people ran down into a crowd of pilgrims coming up a narrow path. On the fateful day, there were around 25,000 people against an average of 15,000 pilgrims visiting the temple each day. More shocking was the lathi-charging of the crowd by the local police. With heavy rains making things worse and the path turning slippery, most of the victims in which women and children got killed. Perhaps, better crowd management would have prevented the ghastly tragedy.

A stampede, which commonly describes a sudden rush of a crowd of people with no clear direction or purpose, is synonymous to mass impulse among herd animals as cattle, elephants and wild horses. The response, known to help animals escape predators, is believed to originate from biological responses in the brains and endocrine systems. Human stampedes mostly occur during religious pilgrimages and huge mass gathering in public places, resulting in many injuries and death, mainly from suffocation and trampling.

A number of factors including lack of awareness/irresponsible behavior among people, chaos created due to VVIP movement and absence of emergency management initiatives often seem to compound the situation. In January 2005, about 300 people, mostly women and children, were killed in a temple stampede in Maharashtra’s Satara   district. At Hardwar as some 25 lakh devotees thronged the temple through a bridge that was already damaged, a stampede leaving 20 people dead and six injured. In November 2004, four women and a teenage girl were killed and 10 others injured in a stampede at the New Delhi railway station.

With over two million people assembling at Mina, Saudi Arabia every year, and stampedes having sniffed out hundreds of lives. A new special police force formed last year has been empowered to monitor the flow of people as also prevent pilgrims and vendors from loiter people, including three policemen were crushed to death in a stampede. With stampedes killing, hundreds of people every year in different parts of different country and in our country to incapacitate an equal number of them, there is an imperative need to get mad and act. Surely it is time to seriously consider putting in place an effective management, control and monitoring mechanism to prevent, avoidable tragedies. Be it any place of public gathering like a temple, stadium, clubs etc, a system of delineating  clear entry and exit routes besides deployment of sufficient police and medical personnel is necessary.  Places which are generally crowded should be monitored properly and in monitoring crowd movement, trained volunteers can be roped in to assist the authorities in ensuring that the strength of people does not exceed a certain limit at a certain time. People need to be educated and then only we will be able to stop these killer stampedes.