Sunday, January 16, 2011

Managing crowds no small task, but possible

MYSORE: Planning for the 10-day Dasara festivities is no more an annual ritual for the Mysore police, but effective management of hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Way ahead of the 2010 edition of the festivities, they contacted their counterparts in Uttarakhand for crowd management and got a senior IPS officer to train cops on it. DIG Alok Sharma was here to train the police on the nitty-gritty of crowd handling, taking a cue from his experience during Maha Kumbh Mela at Haridwar, when 15 million devotees thronged the religious site.

The effort was to ensure that Jumboo Savari that attracts at least three lakh people along the 5.4 km route, passes off peacefully. It did, a senior official pointed out.

It has been over four centuries since Mysore has been hosting the Dasara procession, but focus on the crowd has been a recent trend. So much so that there were plans to change the procession route to make it safe for the tourists. Post-arrests of two Pakistan-based `alleged' terrorists in the city days after Dasara in 2005, the city cops are not taking chances either. But there have been no mishaps, as luck would have it, during the procession either and that has assisted the official machinery.

Ahead of Panchalinga Darshana at the religious site, Talkad, on the banks of river Cauvery in November 2009, the district administration put in place an action plan and implemented it. To ease traffic movement, temporary bus stands were set up at 12 places some one km away from the temple town, one-way traffic was introduced on the approach roads and they approached the elite Madras Engineering Group for logistical assistance. The event that attracted an estimated eight lakh in 10 days was a smooth affair too.

Read more: Managing crowds no small task, but possible - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mysore/Managing-crowds-no-small-task-but-possible/articleshow/7293828.cms#ixzz1BGxPzs2K

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