Rome was not built in a day and surely Romans never got a chance to visit the Kumbh city. But hey, why are we comparing Rome with the Maha Kumbh Nagari? Because the two cities have one thing in common: The mammoth challenge of their creation. Avikal Somvanshi takes us around the city of faith, which is the temporary abode for more people than those inhabiting Tokyo, the largest city in the world!
So, have you heard stories of mega cities like Atlantis and El Dorado disappearing without a trace? This is a tale of a similar city, albeit with a twist. Unlike Atlantis and El Dorado that vanished never to be found again, this one disappears to reappear every twelve years. As I write this, this ephemeral, yet cyclic phenomenon, is underway at the holy confluences of Ganga and Yamuna rivers in the north Indian city of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. Let us take a walk around the Maha Kumbh Nagari, the mother of all mega cities…
Start at sankranti
Kumbh city comes to life for just 55 days. This gargantuan Hindu festivity which goes by the name of Kumbh mela or the pitcher fair, celebrates the spilling over of the nectar of immortality at the holy confluence. According to Hindu mythology, a dip at the site of the spill during this period can wash away all the sins of a person and free their soul from the vicious cycle of rebirths. This is the single most important event of Hinduism and a must-attend for all practicing Hindus.
The city starts to take shape only after the monsoon flood water recedes in October. The festivity starts with the harvest festival Makarsankranti — this is the time the population of the city swells. The zenith is reached on mauni amavasya (the new moon day) with more than 35 million people in the city! That is more than the number of people living in Tokyo, the biggest city on Earth! After amavasya or no moon night, the city gradually shrinks and ultimately disappears without a trace after mahashivratri, the festival dedicated to Lord Shiva as ordained by the Hindu calendar. Well, almost no trace is left behind...
Making of the mega-city
The “pop-up” city (as christened by the great minds from Harvard University, who were also at the Kumbh this year) is more akin to refugee camps than a regular city in its typology. Populated with make-shift tents and huts the city is no different from Dadaab, Kenya, the biggest refugee camp in the world when viewed aerially. The difference lies in the context – one is the result of age old faith and the other a humanitarian crisis.
Spread over a 20 square kilometre area (approx), the city becomes the most densely populated place on Earth at its peak; almost 2,000 times the density of the host city of Allahabad and more than four times the density of India’s biggest slum, Dharavi in Mumbai. Massive resources and man power goes into ensuring that it does not become as precarious to live in as as a slum.
Road
On the sandy flood plains of Ganga, a 156.20 km long temporary road network, is put in place with 18 pontoon bridges to ensure effective transport and communication. These roads are not run-of-the-mill tar/concrete roads we drive on, these are made of massive textured sheets of iron, laid back-to-back, and held in place with hooks. Some of the inner roads laid with hay-stacks were less sophisticated but more effective in the rain. These streets are lined with 22,000 halogen lights placed 15 metres apart, lighting up the entire area like a carnival.
Water
To ensure safe water supply a 550 km-long water pipeline is laid. This pipeline is long enough to transport sangam water from Allahabad to Delhi. 40 bore-wells pump 80 million litres a day of water from 600 - 800 feet underground, round the clock to cater to the city. Water supply might not be adequate for the population of the city, but 20,000 connections make water easily accessible.
Sanitation
10,900 public toilets are erected to provide hygienic ways to tend to nature’s call along with 35,000 individual toilets for the private tents. There were 7,000 eco-sanitation toilets specially designed by students of IIT-Kanpur.
Power
Electricity to light up the festive ambience and run the essential services is made available via 73 electricity substations, set up especially for the mela, with a 770 km-long supply line and 130,000 private connections.
Administration
With such a large turnout, safety is of utmost concern. Authorities have deployed 12,000+ police officers and 20,000+ paramilitary force to man 30 fire fighting stations and 30 police stations.
Functioning of the city
The city is planned to function like any other city with all amenities and services. It is divided into 14 self-sustaining sectors, with each sector sub-divided into smaller wards. Each ward has its own public distribution centre, for subsidised ration, and milk booths. Small retail shops and food joints with a hospital in each sector complete the self-contained neighbourhoods. How is that for sustainable living?!
Planned on a very rigid and easy to manage grid pattern with very wide right of ways (roads), the city is ideal from a policing, security and hygiene-control point of view — very similar to the modern city of Chandigarh. But unlike Chandigarh, people here are allowed to setup their camps according to their whims and convenience. This freedom has resulted in really diverse and colourful clusters mushrooming within the sanitised un-Indian road pattern, abuzz with life and chaos.
THE DOWNSIDES
The temporary nature of the entire settlement compounds many problems, including accommodation and privacy. It also reduces the accountability of the city for its doing, making it a little spoilt and wasteful.
LACKING AMENITIES:
Tents are mere shelters, with no really protection from the bone chilling cold of January and February. The city has extensive road network, but no public transport facilities. Private vehicles coupled with autos and paddle rickshaws choke the main roads, and are a nuisance for pedestrians. In addition, Kumbh city has its back towards the streets with high boundary walls cutting off the streets from residents’ vision. If it was not so over-crowded, the city streets would be very unsafe.
SOLID WASTE POLLUTION:
Solid waste management is a serious bottleneck for the city. There are designated garbage pits which are systematically placed all over the city. But their holding capacity is way below the required volume, resulting in overflowing of garbage. The plastic and polythene ban has not helped much, as enforcement has not been effective.
AIR POLLUTION:
Cooking food is yet another simmering issue. Literally. Limited supply of LPG and its relatively higher pricing compels people to use firewood to cook. Burning of firewood is highly polluting and has reduced the air to a toxic mix. The flammable nature of the whole construction coupled with widespread open burning for cooking means fire outbreak is a major hazard. As usual, even this year there was a fire incident in the city.
VOICE OF THE CITY:
Every city has its own sound, so does Kumbh city. It is the loudest and most cacophonous melee of sounds you may hear in your lifetime. Even the loudest rock concert pales in comparison. Clashing sound systems blaring distorted sounds and music, regular announcement addressing lost and found people (officially more than 2,70,000 go missing in the mela), honking of vehicles on street and humming of millions walking and talking, makes for the most mind boggling noise pollution. This absurdity has driven away most of the spectacular migratory birds, which were known to flock the rivers, this time of the year. Will improved water quality and quantity in the rivers bring them back?
INFRASTRUCTURE COLLAPSE:
Apart from the intra-city mobility, intercity transport management is a daunting challenge. Thousands and millions pour into the city everyday braving the odds on overcrowded trains and buses. Kumbh city is dependent upon the host city of Allahabad for facilitating and channelling this floating population, apart from other logistic support. Railway stations and bus stations are the type of infrastructure that cannot be built overnight. Though much effort and money was spent on upgrading and beautifying Allahabad’s existing infrastructure not much was done to streamline these transport interchange points.
The stampede at the Allahabad railway junction which killed 36 pilgrims was a result of an infrastructural collapse. The railway authorities increased the number of trains from Allahabad by 100, but the basic capacity of the station remained 40,000. When a crowd of 2,00,000 people landed up to board their train after the royal bath on February 10, a simple management adjustment of shifting platform of one of the trains snowballed into a tragedy.
MAXING CAPACITY:
The city also faces another challenge, facing all mega cities today - population control and sprawl. Every city has a carrying capacity and things will start to go wrong as soon as that capacity is breached. The key to crowd management, say experts, is to know the right capacity of the planned facility - to control and direct the crowd. No prizes for guessing that the policy of maximising attendance of pilgrims beyond this capacity is the root cause of infrastructure malfunction.
LEGACY OF THE CITY:
The city is temporary, so it never has to live through all the ills which it generates. Mass bathing in the river causing pollution aside, the mammoth task of hosting and providing for all hygienic and other basic needs of 100 million visitors leaves behind mammoth amounts of waste. Plus, Allahabad hardly gains anything as the host city because the entire infrastructure erected is uprooted and moved away at the end of the festivity.
WEATHERING THE WEATHER:
The faith of the city was further tested this year by heavy rains thanks to the unusually strong western disturbance (cyclonic winds which are responsible for winter rain spells in north India) on February 15-16. The mega infrastructure shuddered, but weathered it better than most metros of India. Tents were sodden wet and roads muddier, but there was no prolonged water logging of roads as reported from Allahabad. In fact the roads made of hay-stacks held steadier in the rains, outclassing the fancier steel roads which got really mucky.
That Explains It!
But people still feel bliss and peace here. Something beyond common sense, and deserving of scientific research, don’t you think? Well, five universities (Allahabad university and four universities from the UK) came together to solve the mystery of this logic defying behaviour. Professor N Srinivasan, head of the Centre for Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, says, “We put the kalpvasis, pilgrims performing penance at Kumbh, through two types of cacophonous sounds — one from the mela, which included bhajans — and the other was that of city sounds. The kalpvasis liked the previous sounds, feeling bliss."
"Generally, our perception about crowd is negative. We do not want to hear cacophony. We do not want people jostling for space. But for pilgrims at Kumbh, this turns out to be a blissful experience. It is because they are not competing with each other. In fact, they help each other out. In our jargon, this can be explained by three things — shared identity, relationality and collective self-realisation; all of which culminates in a positive experience," Professor Stephen Reicher from the University of St. Andrews, UK, added, “By all the tenets of conventional wisdom, the mela shouldn’t work.
It is crowded, noisy and unsanitary. One might expect people to be stressed, quarrelsome and conflictual. Yet, the event is harmonious and people are serene. Studying the mela has forced us to reconsider many basic beliefs about how people function in society.”
Full of verve of a typical Indian bazaar, the city teems with colours and chaos. Streets are abuzz with exotic offerings, soothsayers, fortune telling parrots, rustic flutes and whistles, scantily-clad sadhus and colourful knick-knacks. Everyone hosts a langar (community kitchen) and no one goes to bed hungry in the city of faith. Families come with their bags and baggage (and their cows and goats!) all prepared to live here — not just spend a month of penance!
Slider Heading:
Atlantis in Allahabad
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