If you have been following the news I am sure you must have heard about the massive traffic jam that happened a few days ago on the way to Mahakumbh mela in Prayagraj, UP. Vehicles coming to Kumbh via Madhya Pradesh were stuck in a long traffic jam over 300kms long. This is a world record that beat the previous record holder (100kms) by a significant margin. This incident has caused a lot of people to raise questions about the arrangements and the usual suspects have started putting India down.
The previous record holder jam happened on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway where traffic was stalled for over 100 km due to roadwork heavy vehicle traffic, and breakdowns. It took China 12 Days to clear the jam with the folks stuck having to eat, sleep and manage in their vehicles. Contrast this with the Jam in India where the entire thing was cleared out in ~48 hours (2 days), The government made arrangements to provide food, water, and shelter for the affected pilgrims, according to a report by The Hindustan Times.
There are a lot of lessons to be learnt from this and how to avoid such situations in the future, but when pilgrims numbering more than 50 crore (500,000,000) have visited Prayagraj since Jan 13th and ~92 lakh (9,200,000) had taken a dip in just one day there are bound to be issues that show up. To give some context, this number is larger than the population of any country in the world except for India and China.
It is a massive achievement by the organizers that such a big event has been held with such good arrangement and a lot less issues than what I was expecting. Could we have done better? Of course. As I said earlier, there are some major issues that need to be addressed such as the stampede that caused multiple deaths. The root causes for those need to be identified and addressed going forward. The lessons learnt from this will also help with other large scale events and mobilizations (such as during emergency situations).
Press Release: Maha Kumbh 2025 Witnesses Record-Breaking Footfall
– Suramya