Anatomy of a stampede

Harnidh Kaur completed her Masters in Public Policy from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. She can be found on
Twitter at @pedestrianpoet. Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com. Sat, Sep 30 2017.

What led to the tragedy at Prabhadevi (still mostly referred to as Elphinstone) Station? What,
if anything, could have stopped it? What can we do about it now?

To understand the anatomy of a stampede is the first step. Elphinstone Station, as Prabhadevi
was once known, has a lone footbridge opening up to the western side of the station—where
most offices in the area are located. Barely six feet wide, this footbridge has been put under
increasing strain over the last few years. According to police estimates, over one lakh people
use this footbridge during peak traffic hours, and people enter the bridge from several different
directions. The chaos that ensues pushes the density of people on the bridge up to 10 people
per square feet. This was the most obvious cause of the stampede itself. As John J. Fruin (1993)
said:
“At occupancies of about 7 persons per square meter the crowd becomes almost a fluid
mass. Shock waves can be propagated through the mass, sufficient to... Propel them
distances of 3 meters or more... People may be literally lifted out of their shoes, and
have clothing torn off. Intense crowd pressures, exacerbated by anxiety, make it difficult
to breathe, which may finally cause compressive asphyxia. The heat and the thermal
insulation of surrounding bodies cause some to be weakened and faint. Access to those
who fall is impossible. Removal of those in distress can only be accomplished by lifting
them up and passing them overhead to the exterior of the crowd.”

According to recent studies (Helbing et al, 2007), it is often not the density alone that kills
people. The crowd dynamics are to blame too. When the density is so high, physical interaction
between people causes a chain reaction. At such high densities, force travels from one body to
another at a rapid pace. At Elphinstone, it appears that people were already assembled in such
high densities. The force chains that form in such crowds are hard to predict, exacerbated by
the fact that attempts at relief often backfire spectacularly.

People tried to help children and women, but ended up falling on top of them. This lead to
further casualties. This caused an uncontrollable collective dynamic to occur in the crowd,
which is called “crowd turbulence” or “crowd quake” (Johannason et al. 2008). The crowd
itself, acting like a fluid, becomes a force so powerful that even large numbers of police
personnel find themselves inundated, and incapable of managing the situation. The police on
ground at Elphinstone watched haplessly as the situation on the bridge worsened because they
couldn’t even enter the crowd itself. Individuals ended up being even more vulnerable. They
were exposed to a large risk of losing balance and stumbling. This lead to an obvious “domino
effect”, eventually leading to suffocation.

In situations like these, it is easy to explain away crowd behaviour as a hysterical reaction.
Gustav Le Bon, who can arguably be called the father of crowd psychology, wrote The Crowd:
A Study of the Popular Mind in 1895. He believed that crowd behaviours are inherently
pathological and abnormal, and the mere existence of a crowd can, and will, cause civilized
consciousness to vanish and be replaced by savage animal instincts. According to him,
individuals, when they become one with a crowd, lose all sense of self and responsibility. They
no longer identify themselves as individuals with responsibility for their own actions, but
instead, as members of a group, acquire powers of anonymity. This lends to them a definite
sense of power and invincibility. Le Bon’s work has educated crowd control and riot
management techniques for decades all over the world. But more recent work suggests many
problems with this approach of collective hysteria.

As Joseph W. Bendersky (2007) points out in context of the American military’s crowd
management capacity, Le Bon espoused the “law of the mental unity of crowds”, which asserts
that the behavioural characteristics of a crowd are distinctively, and often destructively,
different to the characteristics of the individuals that make up the same crowd. It is to be noted
that a lot of the Indian police’s crowd management systems still exist in Le Bon’s theories
(Sindu, 2016). This is very problematic, since Le Bon’s theory does not take into account the
crowd’s context—their everyday behaviours, habits, and idiosyncrasies. Indeed, it actively
removes the crowd action from its social underpinnings.

Crowds like the one at Elphinstone are habitual ones, made up of patterns that are easily learned
and observed. This idea also actively legitimizes brutal, aggressive repression. By effectively
bracketing crowds as “unreasonable”, this theory justifies use of violence to control crowds
(Reicher, 1996). We know that the crowds were large and primed for disaster, but they were
not violent. Local train stations in Mumbai rarely are. They run like giant, intricate creatures
that lumber on despite all the reasons they have not to. According to people on ground, the
rough series of events unfolded something like this: a sudden downpour caused people to
scramble up the footbridge that connects the Elphinstone and Parel stations. The railing, a
narrow strip of metal, groaned under pressure, causing people to assume the bridge is falling.
Rumours of a short circuit caused people to panic, and a few attempted to jump off the bridge
to relative safety.

There is an important distinction to be made here. Most crowd disasters are not panic-driven
stampedes. They’re craze-driven crushes. People at events like concerts move towards
something, causing a disaster. What happened in Mumbai was because people were terrified.
They were the victims, and hence the most vulnerable stakeholders. No one in the crowd could
have possibly caused the stampede, and no one could have prevented it. So, who’s responsible?
Additional director general of railways (police), Jai Jeet Singh, points out that the police on the
ground was essentially helpless because of the infrastructure. A crowd of the density that the
bridge was housing is, in his words, “not something we can control”. The infrastructure itself
was primed to improve back in 2015, when demands for an increase in the size of the footbridge
were made to former railway minister Suresh Prabhu by Shiv Sena MP Rahul Shewale. A
sanction of Rs11.86 crore for the construction of a foot overbridge was made, and the demand
was reiterated by Shiv Sena MP Arvind Sawant via a letter in 2016. The status of that
construction is unknown, with the money apparently spent on a bridge on the eastern, lesser
used side of the station.

What isn’t a mystery, however, is that people have been immensely worried about this bridge.
Social media is rife with posts about it for the past few years, with people trying desperately to
bring to light the plight of passengers. What happened at Elphinstone could have, at least, been
delayed a few years with superior crowd management techniques. There are ample models
available, and ample scope of improvement. The police in India is trained to “control” crowds,
not “manage” them. Concepts like stewardship, car-following models (which echo how schools
of fish find their way around an overcrowded feeding spot) and basic disaster management
systems are all nascent for our forces.
Officers like Singh are trying to bring about a change by studying models like those followed
by the London Underground. However, these will take time and political will—both of which
are lacking. The Indian system of executive policing is also marked by a noted absence of any
lateral expertise, which leaves the forces unequipped with the latest work done in the field.
Holistic, non-aggressive crowd management in India is a while away, yes. But new
infrastructure, the need for which has been stressed upon by urban planners, pedestrian
movement experts, transport experts and civic architects, isn’t.

The simple addition of another footbridge on the western side of the platform, an extension of
the width of the platform itself, and permanent barricades maintaining the inflow and outflow
of the foot traffic will cost the government a minuscule sum when compared to what it’s willing
to spend on vanity projects, and would serve a much larger number of people.

The stampede will have the government scrambling to bring the project back to life and have
a bridge up in the next few months, but Singh believes it will not help. According to him, knee-
jerk reactions meant to solely appease an angry citizenry are useless, because they don’t address
the underlying causes of these disasters. The construction conducted by the railways is also
extremely slow and hampering, as seen by the renovations at the Borivali station. The
renumbering of the platforms at Borivali, which is the latest phase of the same, has taken over
three months, and will probably take more. The construction of a footbridge, or an extension
to the existing one, at a station as busy as Elphinstone, will take a long time, and will show no
immediate results.
“You need to make sure the ingress and egress crowds are separated and not allowed
to mingle,” Singh says. “That’s the only way to make sure the density doesn’t rise to
such dangerous levels again.” He does have an immediate suggestion for helping ease
out the crowd crush, however. He suggests staggering office timings on an hourly basis,
especially in professional hubs like Lower Parel. This would allow a steady, better
managed crowd to move in and out of the station without the threat of a stampede. As
he says, “There is no reason for people to continue with inefficient systems.”

These systems are not just inefficient, though. They are life-threatening. No one should have
to go through a gauntlet in the name of public transport to reach work and back. The famed
“spirit of Mumbai” is going to rear its exhausted head again, but mostly because it has no other
choice. The city, as a whole, has reached a point of apathy and disillusionment; the fact that an
average of nine people die daily in train-related accidents does not elicit anything but a tired
shrug. 3,202 people died in 2016. The number was higher in 2015, with 3,304 dead, according
to information released to activist Sameer Jhaveri under a Right to Information application.
This indifference is exploited by the government in power.

It is time to be angry, yes. But it is also time to reflect and question. Governments running
unchecked and brazen despite being directly responsible for these deaths are responsible. Civic
bodies that do not take citizen sentiment into account are responsible. You and I, with our
ability to reach out to people on various levels to educate them, are responsible because we
decided not to do the same.

The systems are either missing or irreparably broken, and individual effort leads to very little
change. It’s a difficult situation to be in, but one that should galvanize collective action. As
taxpayers, as citizens, as Mumbaikars, we deserve better. This city has made us, and it’s time
to accord it with the respect and improvement it deserves. This starts from us.