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A preventable tragedy in Bengaluru spotlights India's chronic crowd management gaps—how many more must die before safety becomes policy, not chance?
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On the evening of 5 June 2025, the streets outside Bengaluru’s M. Chinnaswamy Stadium pulsed with elation. The Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) franchise had big plans for a public celebration of its team’s maiden Indian Premier League (IPL) victory. Every seat in the 35,000-capacity stadium filled fast, and every inch of available space was crammed with people. Outside, as the crowd swelled beyond anything anticipated, barricades gave way. Eleven people, several merely in their teens, died in the ensuing stampede. Yet again, a stampede has laid bare the fatal cracks in India’s crowd management capabilities.
The article does not intend to evaluate the specific causes or governance failures that resulted in the Bengaluru stampede—the ongoing investigations will unearth those. Instead, it uses this tragedy as a lens to analyse the governance, administrative, and executive failures in numerous such incidents in the past and identify actionable pathways to prevent such tragedies from recurring.
Historically, numerous lives have been lost in stampedes worldwide. To cite recent examples, 85 people died in Sanaa, Yemen, during a charity event in August last year; 2,300 people died during the Haj stampede in 2015—the worst-ever recorded; 159 died during a Halloween celebration in Seoul, in 2022, while 135 lives were lost in a stampede following football hooliganism in Malang, Indonesia, in 2022.
However, the more concerning fact is that stampedes occur with alarming frequency across India. In the past 20 years, over 1,200 people have died in 18 stampedes across India. Cities in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have witnessed multiple such tragedies unfold. Each incident is followed by a series of shock, condolence, political scapegoating, a perfunctory brand of inquiry, and ultimately—silence.
Teeming congregations anywhere are prone to uncontrolled chaos, making them vulnerable to stampedes. However, the failure to plan, learn, and act translates these vulnerabilities into tragedies. Barring the National Disaster Management Authority’s (NDMA) crowd management guidelines, none of India’s states or cities have a uniform protocol that mandates how to plan, execute, and manage large public events. Additionally, the NDMA and the disaster management authorities at the state and district levels are policymaking and coordinating bodies. While their services are indispensable during natural disasters that devastate regions over several days or weeks, they may be ill-suited for stampedes that erupt and escalate within minutes. As a result, the burden of crowd management typically falls on overstretched police forces and civic officials—many of whom lack adequate training and equipment.
Most stampedes are a consequence of poor crowd control and a failure to anticipate the turnout. For instance, the wild celebrations on Bengaluru’s streets the previous night, 4 June 2025, offered clear indications that crowds far beyond capacity would turn up. Still, there was no entry cap, no pre-registration, and no plan to manage the situation/event if it went haywire. Naturally so, lakhs of fans jostled to enter.
Similarly, at the July 2024 Hathras stampede—which claimed over 120 lives, mostly women and children—thousands attempted to rush out of the religious function through narrow, unregulated paths that led to a choke point. The organisers had permission for just 80,000 attendees, yet over 250,000 people gathered.
Narrow exits, absent signage, and a lack of crowd flow modelling define the norm of such venues—whether open-air or enclosed—and end up becoming death traps within minutes.
While stadiums and other large venues globally utilise Artificial Intelligence (AI) to monitor crowd movement and drones to track their density, authorities in India continue to rely primarily on manual oversight. Despite notable advances—even within India, such as the deployment of drones during Ganpati Visarjan in Mumbai and the high-security Republic Day parade in Delhi—there remains limited institutional learning. As a result, capabilities such as early warnings, live alerts, and real-time decision-making are yet to be meaningfully integrated.
Stampedes are often triggered by panic—a result of poor communication and inadequate planning. Imagine if the Bengaluru event had necessitated prior registrations. If real-time surveillance and communication had alerted authorities to congestion hotspots. If staggered entry had been enforced. If emergency response teams with proper medical kits and stretchers had been pre-deployed. Suppose enough ambulances were deployed near the entry and exit gates, and traffic was regulated on all arterial roads. The difference between a celebration and a tragedy is often just a handful of decisions—made early and wisely. Sometimes, all it takes is a few more feet of space, one extra exit, or a timely announcement to save lives.
Some of the following measures, which ensure preparedness, response, and recovery, would help prevent stampedes and save lives.
Risk Assessment and Preventive Measures: Every large gathering—religious, cultural, political, or commercial—must be assessed for mandatory crowd risks as a precondition for approval. This should include:
SOPs and Multi-Agency Protocols: Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) must be codified and legally enforced across India—defining the roles of each agency (police, fire, health, civic bodies, event organisers), maximum permissible crowd per square metre, and the thresholds for evacuation triggers (for example, sudden surge, barricade breach and hooliganism). For example, New York has a state-wide SOP for crowd management, requiring trained crowd control managers for any establishment, venue or event hosting 1,000 people or more.
Tech-Driven Surveillance: Employing technology and real-time AI-powered analytics, such as heat maps, can dramatically reduce human error. Drone-based monitoring can provide a live view of the crowd clusters and their build-up. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-tagged access can control and log entries of each person into the venue. Issuing geo-fenced digital passes can minimise unauthorised turnout.
All major events must be meticulously logged and studied for crowd patterns, evacuation times, and logistical gaps. This data should be fed into AI models to improve forecasting accuracy and planning efficiency.
Designated Escape Routes and Signage: Any enclosed venue, stadium, or open ground must have multiple marked entry/exit points with emergency gates, multilingual signage, and public address systems. They must also have pre-planned, pressure-release pathways to disperse surging crowds.
Real-time Communication: From push notifications for real-time updates to loudspeaker alerts, people must be informed of delays, diversions, and any ensuing dangers.
Medical Readiness: Rapid Action Medical Teams (RAMTs) must be strategically stationed, with ambulances near each entry and exit gate. Traffic on connecting roads must be monitored to ensure seamless and speedy movement. Each venue must also have mobile triage units with immediate first-aid capability, and local hospitals placed on emergency alert in advance. Lessons can be learnt from the Oktoberfest in Munich, which drew 6.7 million visitors in 2024.
Policing and Ground Control: Police forces must transition from reactive control to proactive coordination. They must have a separate division with personnel trained in non-lethal interventions for dedicated crowd control measures, as mere batons and barricades are ineffective when panic creeps its way into such large gatherings. Each venue must have a live communication grid connecting ground forces, command centres, medical teams, and organisers.
Civil Defence and Volunteer Force: All mass events must mobilise civil society volunteers (National Cadet Corps, National Social Service, disaster response NGOs) trained in basic disaster response, crowd psychology, first-aid, and evacuation methods, with assigned zones and roles before each event. They must be provided with walkie-talkies, first-aid kits, reflective emergency vests, and stretchers.
Institutional Reform: National, state, and local statutes must integrate crowd risk management as a legal and constitutional mandate for urban planning and disaster response. Simultaneously, India needs a centralised framework—a Mass Gathering Safety Code—that lays down standard procedures for planning, risk assessment, crowd flow, emergency response, and coordination in alignment with the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Mass Gatherings All Hazards Risk Assessment Tool. India must urgently establish Event Safety Authorities to institutionalise risk governance in all metropolises and tier-1 cities.
Infrastructure Overhaul: Stadiums, temples, ghats, and public grounds require re-engineering with crowd safety in mind, featuring wide gates, illuminated signage, pressure-release exits, and designated holding zones.
Fixing Accountability: Stampedes are governance failures that must invite consequences for ignoring safety protocols. Post-incident investigation and accountability fixing must be entrusted to an independent and neutral multi-agency inquiry panel. The findings must lead to action—penalties, suspensions, and prosecution where negligence is proven and not end up as raddi (discarded) reports on government shelves.
Compensation and Victim Assistance: With the proliferation of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), compensation amounts must reach the next of kin within one week and the injured within 72 hours of the incident. The government must also ensure psychological and trauma counselling for survivors and families. Tracking systems for the wounded and missing must be updated in real time and made publicly accessible.
India is a country of crowds—of processions and pilgrimages, cricket and community, and democracy lived out loud. It takes pride in the scale of its democracy, the technicolour of its festivals, and the roar of its stadiums. Unless public gatherings are managed with foresight and responsibility, mourning their aftermath will remain a recurring reality. The Bengaluru stampede will not be the last—unless decisive action is taken to prevent the next.
Dhaval Desai is a Senior Fellow and Vice President at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Dhaval is Senior Fellow and Vice President at Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai. His spectrum of work covers diverse topics ranging from urban renewal to international ...
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