Lessons Unlearnt

Public safety must take precedence over every form of celebration. No festival, however grand or culturally significant, can justify putting human lives at risk. Yet, this fundamental principle is repeatedly ignored, as tragedies involving stampedes, fires and structural hazards continue to claim lives and destroy property with alarming regularity. Increasingly, large public gatherings make headlines not for their novelty, splendour or cultural significance, but for the disasters that expose glaring lapses in safety and administration. There is little point in revisiting the long list of such incidents that have claimed hundreds of lives. The more disturbing reality is that, despite the scale of these tragedies, accountability remains elusive and meaningful corrective measures are conspicuous by their absence. The tragedy at Kolkata’s Chorbagan Sarbojanin Durgotsav is the latest addition to this grim catalogue. To suggest that such a disaster was unforeseeable would be to overlook the complacency that has come to characterise crowd management at major public celebrations. Durga Puja, the biggest festival of the Bengali community, draws millions of people to pandals across the state. The sheer scale of the gatherings demands meticulous planning, rigorous safety inspections and constant vigilance. Instead, the successful conduct of festivities over the years appears to have bred a dangerous sense of complacency among those entrusted with public safety. Past successes seem to have been mistaken for proof that existing arrangements are beyond question, diminishing the urgency of strengthening security inside and around pandals where thousands of devotees converge every day.

The circumstances surrounding the Chorbagan tragedy raise serious questions about the scrutiny exercised by the authorities before granting permission for elaborate decorations and large-scale public gatherings. Festive embellishments may enhance the visual appeal of a pandal, but they must never compromise structural stability, safe passage or emergency access. If the arrangements at the venue created conditions that endangered visitors, the obvious question is how they passed the necessary inspections and received official clearance in the first place. Equally troubling are reports that warnings about potential dangers had surfaced on social media before the tragedy, which were not examined and acted upon? The authorities had several options available to them, including imposing enforceable limits on number of visitors, restricting access to vulnerable areas and ordering immediate corrective measures. If the risks could not be adequately addressed, suspending public access or even closing the venue would have been justified. Such decisions might have inconvenienced organisers and disappointed visitors, but that would have been a small price to pay for preventing a catastrophe. Administrative caution is not an obstacle to celebration; it is the condition that makes celebration safe. Public outrage and official assurances after the event will mean little unless they lead to concrete action. The administration must establish how the disaster occurred, determine whether safety regulations were violated, fix responsibility for any negligence and ensure that those found culpable face appropriate consequences. More importantly, crowd management at major festivals must be treated as a year-round administrative responsibility rather than a ritual exercise undertaken before the festivities begin. Safety audits, emergency evacuation plans, crowd-density monitoring, fire precautions and clearly defined accountability mechanisms must be mandatory.