Crowd Dynamics of a Rural Group in a Mass Religious Gathering: A Case Study of Kumbh Mela - 2016, India

Numerous instances of stampede have been witnessed and many lives have been lost till date in mass religious gatherings. While trying to model the evolution of crowd for planning, design and assessment of facilities, major focus has been on simulating such scenarios by modelling individual behaviour whereas group behaviour and effect of cultural differences have been overlooked to a large extent. This study focusses on understanding the group behaviour of people coming from a rural base in a dense setup like Kumbh Mela in India. Both rural and non-rural groups were observed, and data was used to infer understanding of diversity in group behaviour. The predominant shape of groups and their area occupancy were looked upon to draw inference on representative spatial formation for different group sizes and varying personal space of individuals. It was observed that for all group sizes, the group's cohesion and its shape vary with respect to the prevailing density conditions and proximity-to-destination. This study presents the inferences drawn from this unique empirical data and paves way for further work, which by utilizing the results of this study, proposes to test a constructed simulation against a synthetic simulation by incorporating behavioural attributes of crowd in the model.