Athi-Varadar 2019: Joys and travails of gatekeeping

On a recent, hot August afternoon, the abode of Athi-Varadar was teeming with a continual flow of pilgrims, 73,000 devotees had completed darshan, and several thousand were waiting in the queue. I was checking the deployment near the East Gopuram when a weak elderly woman struggling to push an old man in a wheelchair passed by me. Pitying her plight, I directed a policeman standing beside me to help the women out with the wheelchair. The old man called me over and started talking. With a grin, he said, “I was here in 1979; it was a darshan with less than a dozen people around me. Today, I feel as though the entire humanity has descended on this temple.” He paused for a while, turning emotional he continued "My dad was in the wheelchair then. Although dad was desperate to view Athi-Varadar he couldn’t. There was no ramp then. The present dispensation has helped me experience what my father back then couldn’t.
Not once but thrice. I am grateful to the government; he said.  As the constable wheeled him away, I could sense his whole-persona become aglow with an attitude of gratitude.
 
Similarly, a few others who recalled the previous event back then in 1979, did not seem to remember seeing any crowd, or the present craze at the temple even on the most auspicious days. An SI or a constable was all that they needed occasionally to oversee the devotees. However, the Athi-Varadar festival of 2019 witnessed a turnout of over 14 million pilgrims turning up to pay obeisances to Lord Athi-Varadar during the 48 days of festivities. The festival drew to a close on Saturday with the deity being laid to rest in the  Ananthasaras tank at the Varadaraja Perumal temple.

When the Athi-Varadar festival started on July 1, 2019. I was less than one month old as ADGP (L&O). I received a message to attend a coordination meeting towards the end of June in connection with the raising of Athi-Varadar. All I knew then was that they held Mahamaham at Kumbakonam once in 12 years and Kumbh Mela every 4 years. I never knew of any temple holding a festival once every 40 years and spread over 48 days. The meeting that day for the first time in my life disclosed the fact that Athi -Varadar was a festival that happened once in 40 years and lasted for 48 days.

We know India for its magnificent temples with devotees thronging in thousands. Sri Venkateswara Swamy temple, popularly known as Tirupati temple, is the most famous of them, it receives the highest footfall at 50,000 to 60,000 devotees on an average day. The other four temples which receive high footfall
are Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala at  50,000 to 55,000 footfalls, Vaishnodevi Temple at Jammu, at 30,000 to 40,000 footfalls, Golden Temple at Amritsar at 40,000 footfalls and Jagannath temple at Puri at around 30,000 footfalls per day.

As the event happens once in 40 years, a person in his lifetime can witness the celebrations only once or maximum twice. It is therefore extremely difficult to make an assessment of the turnout of devotees after 40 years have elapsed. During the coordination meeting, the authorities connected with the temples informed us that, as per their assessment, there would be a daily footfall of 15,000 to 20,000 devotees per day.

Despite the assessment pointed out during the meeting and in spite of having no clue of what to expect, the SP of Kanchi prepared and implemented a bandobast plan which envisaged one lakh footfalls per day. Looking back, the assessment made by SP Kanchi was way beyond the footfalls seen at Tirupati temple, which receives the highest footfall. Despite this, the devotees thronging Athi-Varadar temple defied all expectations and threw the crowd management system and the city of Kanchipuram out of gear by attracting ten to fifteen times more crowd than what the authorities assessed initially.

Crowd management during the Athi Varadar festival started to become a huge challenge to the police after the first week as the crowds started flocking the temple started to distend beyond two lakh devotees. Police also had to come to grips with and overcome the challenge of a flawed crowd management architecture handed to us in the form of a temple with a single entrance and a single exit, lacking facilities to marshal pilgrims, reliance on one major exit, allowing excess pilgrims over holding capacity, limited holding area at the entrance and the exit, absence of emergency exits, narrow streets around the temples. All of which were recipes for crowd disasters waiting to happen such as stampedes.   

The immensity of the challenge would become obvious if you try imagining 14 million devotees squeezing in through the East entry gate and exiting out of West gate which is 2.5m in width. Priests refused to agree to our request of creation of an additional exit as the agamas did not permit such an opening. For each passing hour, that the temple was open, over 10,000 devotees were extruding out of the narrow passage of approximately 2.5 metre width and 20 metres length. The West gate was made wider by one metre from Aug 8 onwards after the authorities installed a ramp to divert the entry of VIP/VVIP pass holders through a separate entry.  

We know most religious venues in India to be susceptible to stampedes. The Athi Varadhar temple is no exception. Constant vigil was the only way we could build resistance against it and make it free of any stampede. The four or five deaths which happened on July 18 were separate isolated natural deaths that took place because of underlying medical conditions and oppressive heat at different places mostly outside the temple.

The National Crime Records Bureau statistics reveal that from 2000 to 2013, almost 2,000 people died in stampedes. A 2013 study of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (IJDRR) reveals that religious gathering and pilgrimages have been venues for 79% of the stampedes in India. The stampedes in temples happen because of sudden rumours of a suspected electrical short-circuit or rumours of a fire accident. A psychological state of panic can make a crowd go berserk. Overcrowding is another common phenomenon. Most crowd related disasters also happen because of understaffed security personnel, lack of public announcement systems and inadequate briefing of the security personnel. The Tamil Nadu police, on their part, had taken adequate pains to plug all these loopholes.

Scientifically, in a queue we should not have over 2-4 persons per square meter to let the pilgrims have sufficient room to recover after a jostle because if someone in the queue falls and if the person behind bends down to help him, he could get sucked, triggering a pile up that would begin absorbing all the growing pressure from behind. Once a crush begins, it’s hard to reverse the flow and therefore it’s imperative that we have enough space in the areas of crowd flow. Historically, compressive asphyxia has been the most common reason for deaths in crowd disasters. Keeping this in mind, to counter this
 phenomenon, we implemented a box system in place, which envisaged holding the crowd in boxes to only 70 percent of its full capacity.

With time, the crowd pressure kept mounting, the security arrangements kept pace and evolved to cope with the enhanced exigences. The strength of the police which initially was around 2,500 officers and men, grew to 7,500 and to over 13,000 after the lord assumed a standing position from reclining position on August 1. Barricaded queue frameworks started making inroads out of the city into the main roads of the town and around the outer walls of the temple. When the crowd pressure kept growing relentlessly, the district administration accepted our request and built five hold-up areas with basic amenities such as water, toilets, medical units, free food in and around the temples to make the devotees feel more comfortable and help us ensure a smooth flow of queues to provide darshan with a little delay. This helped us reduce not only the spillover onto the streets but also reduced the pressure on the temple gate and helped the devotees get a better experience. As time passed by, it became imperative for us to create four more hold-up areas in the town’s periphery with a total additional capacity of 40,000 devotees having massive juxtaposed parking areas alongside.

To monitor and prevent crowd disasters installation of a dense network of 119 modern state-of-the-art CCTV cameras with monitors in a Mini-Control Room inside the temple premises near West Gopuram helped us monitor critical hazard points including entry/exit gates, bottlenecks, narrow stretches, and all the queues leading to the venue. The CCTV cameras ensured a near cent percent electronic coverage of the entire temple premises.

To amplify the clearance of the devotees inside the temple, we had a system of simultaneously streaming four queues through the sanctum-sanctorum. It blew away a devotee who had come all the way from the USA upon seeing it and thought it was a brilliant idea. To help the physically challenged, senior citizens, pregnant women and small children a separate fast track queue with a wheel chair facility, and battery cars was available at the East Gopuram entrance reducing darshan wait period to a mere 30 minutes on lean days and 4 hours approximately on heavy days. Although, the wait period at other queue lines depended on the day and time, unlike Tirupati where dharma darshan averages 8 hours, the average wait period at the Athi Varadar festival was mostly below 6 hours with a low of 3 hours on some days even when the inflows exceeded five times that of Tirupati.

Amid massive human deluge, we also had to contend with other threats to protect pilgrims from it. Following the revocation of Art 370, there were apprehensions of a jihadi or a fidayeen type of attack from fundamentalists and 30 kms away elections to the parliamentary constituency of Vellore was also happening. To combat the threats, we had to work hard covertly to safeguard the lives of the pilgrims. Further to deter such elements, we had to deploy QRT’s (Quick reaction teams), spotters, BDDS squads, and conduct lodge checks in and around the temple.

Gatekeeping unprecedented crowds at Athi Varadar was a great experience in crowd management. The district administration and various departments including the HR&CE played a great part in the success of the festival. The number of devotees visiting the abode of Athi Varadar was on an average three times bigger than Tirupati. Despite the travails of difficult living and working conditions and bare minimum infrastructure the fact that the district administration and the officers and men of Tamil Nadu police displayed immense resilience and endurance for a period spanning 48 days to ensure a stampede free festival is a source of great joy. Particularly, considering the fact that a stampede at last Athi Varadar festival in 1979 had cost seven lives.