Crush Injuries and Crowd Compression
The most serious cases arriving at casualty wards during visarjan are not the dramatic ones, they are people who were simply standing in the wrong part of a crowd. Crowd crush, clinically called compressive asphyxia, occurs when bodies are pressed together with enough force to restrict breathing. The chest cannot expand. A person can lose consciousness within seconds and show no external injury at all. The 2013 Madhya Pradesh bridge stampede during a Navratri procession, which killed 115 people, is the documented benchmark Indian disaster managers now use when modelling festival crowd density thresholds. During visarjan, the highest-risk zones are narrow lanes near ghats, bridge approaches, and points where multiple procession routes converge. Bystanders and family groups who are not part of the main procession but are watching from the sides face the greatest risk, they have no forward momentum to carry them out of a compression event.
