Getting Things Done and Who Can Do It - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 44

5
Getting Things Done and
Who Can Do It
Every 12 years, tens of millions of people gather over a period of several weeks to bathe
in the sacred river Ganga at a Hindu festival called the Kumbh Mela. This is the biggest
assembly of people anywhere in the world, and there are similar, smaller festivals at oth-
er locations every three years. Naked sadhus covered in ash and adorned with garlands of
flowers mix with rich and poor pilgrims, self-conscious politicians and tourists to enter the
water at auspicious times as near as possible to the confluence of the Ganga with the river
Yamuna at Allahabad, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
In early 2013, around five million people lived there for 55 days in a vast tented camp
covering 6,000 acres. As many as 30m to 50m more people visited every day. Equipped
with electricity and water supplies, sanitation and emergency services, the mela was run by
the state government jointly with religious organizations and other voluntary bodies. There
were no disasters at the site, though 36 people were killed in a stampede at Allahabad rail-
way station.
The successful organization of this complex mega event, with all its potential for chaos
- and in one of India's most corrupt states - belies the failures of jugaad and chalta hai. 'It
shows that the system is capable of saying “we know we have to do this”,' says Montek
Singh Ahluwalia, who runs the Planning Commission. 1 This is also a significant and rare
example of a government learning from a disaster - in 1954, several hundred people were
killed when there was a sudden surge in the crowds. (Another example of disaster trigger-
ing a new approach came in Orissa in October 2013, when fewer than 25 people died in a
massive cyclone - the state and central governments had learned lessons from a cyclone in
1999 when 10,000 people were killed because of a lack of planning and effective adminis-
tration.) 2
The significant point about the Kumbh Mela is that one senior official from the Uttar
Pradesh government was in sole charge. He reported to top state bureaucrats and to the
chief minister, but he had overall administrative powers based on the authority of a dis-
trict magistrate. Akhilesh Yadav, the state's young chief minister, was inevitably quick to
welcome plaudits when he led a delegation to Harvard University to discuss how it was
organized, 3 but basically, politicians did not interfere. 'It only goes on for a short time, so
it is not a threat to political authority, and its success is important politically because of the