Harvard’s next case study:The logistics and economics behind Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering in history By Logan Plaster — January 14, 2013
Logan
Plaster is an editor and writer in New York, and is the managing editor
of Emergency Physicians Monthly This week, the city of Allahabad in
northern
India kicks off the Kumbh Mela, a 48-day Hindu festival that is
expected to be the largest human gathering in history. In addition to
the more-than 30 million pilgrims descending upon the flood plain of the
Yamuna and Ganges rivers, the Kumbh will host a team of Harvard
researchers in what is likely the school’s more inter-disciplinary
project ever. I will be traveling among them, assisting a team of
emergency physicians and praying against stampedes.
The Kumbh Mela, which historically has received little press in the
West, takes place every four years, and gains special significance every
12. This year, 2013, will be that 12th year—called the Purna
(―complete‖) Kumbh and officials expect somewhere between 30 million and
60 million ascetics and pilgrims to travel to holy sites to bathe. It
is believed that during this auspicious astrological moment, the waters
of the Ganges have the ability to wash away layer upon layer of karmic
debt. Some will splash and play in the water like ecstatic children,
living on the river bank for a month, while others will perform the
perfunctory dip and be on their way. Behind the pilgrims is another
group —one slightly less inclined to enter the murky ganges—who will
travel thousands of miles by plane, train and autorickshaw for a very
different reason: To answer the question, ―How on earth is an event of
this size possible?‖ To fully grapple with this
question, the scale of the Kumbh needs to be put in perspective.
Imagine the entire population of Shanghai—about 23 million—camping on a
4×8 kilometer field. Add to that mass of humanity every last man, woman
and child in New York City and you’re getting closer to the Kumbh’s
expected attendance. But still not quite there. The area of the mela is
also on the rise: from 1,495.31 hectare and 11 sectors in 2001 to
1936.56 hectare and 14 sectors in 2013. That’s about 4,784 acres of land
– about the size of Madrid’s famous Casa de Campo park. For hundreds of
years, the size of the Kumbh has been of interest primarily to bathing
pilgrims and local officials trying to maintain order. But this year it
caught the attention of Harvard University, which saw the Kumbh Mela as a
unique opportunity to study the formation and inner-workings of a
pop-up mega city. Where recently there was nothing but a barren flood
plain there will soon be a thriving
―city‖ complete with hospitals, sanitation systems, markets and police.
The Kumbh has always operated in this capacity, but for a variety of
reasons, the 2013 festival represents a significant shift towards seeing
the festival as a seminal academic learning environment.
Harvard’s South Asia Institute, a group that connects all the schools at
Harvard for the sake of inter-disciplinary regional projects, sees this
as an unprecedented opportunity. The Institute has coordinated 35
students and faculty from four distinct schools to travel to the
festival and study everything from water quality to sanitation
techniques to health clinic readiness. Somewhat shockingly, this is a
real first for Harvard, which typically operates in a much more siloed
fashion. Harvard Business School has its world and the School of Public
Health has its, and rarely the twain shall meet. ―This is probably the
first time that Harvard is doing something like this, where we’ve pulled
together four different disciplines in a way that all faculty and
students are going to be together to look at a phenomenon,‖ says Meena
Hewett, associate director of Harvard’s South Asia Institute. The
obvious candidates for a project of this nature are the
students and faculties from Harvard’s school of public health. They’ll
be there in force, studying health clinic readiness, sanitation and
water-borne illnesses. But next to them will be researchers from
Harvard’s school of urban design and the business school. One faculty
member from Harvard Business School is interested in using the festival
to develop one of the school’s famous case studies. They’ll dissect many
of the critical questions that the Kumbh organizers have to make in
order to keep the event safe, secure and egalitarian. Others will look
at the question of how prices within the many Kumbh markets get
determined. For example, since the Kumbh Mela takes place only every 12
years, 2013 marks the first Kumbh which will be criss-crossed with cell
phone towers and where a critical mass of people will be using mobile
phones. That environment creates a unique opportunity for researchers
interested in studying ―big data.‖ They’ll be
looking into questions like how anonymized cell phone data can assist
in infectious disease mapping.
These questions overlap those being asked by Harvard’s school of urban
design, whose researchers will focus more on ―the metabolism‖ of the
Kumbh. How are goods being transported? How are they transporting clean
drinking water, how are public toilets and cooking areas designed and
kept at a distance from one another? On the outside, the overlap between
urban design and global health appears painfully obvious, yet research
collaborations of this nature are all too rare. The hope is that by
studying a pop-up mega-city, researchers would learn lessons applicable
to a wide range of mass gathering events, from refugee camps to music
festivals like Burning Man. How do people move en masse? How can the
spread of disease be kept in check using minimal technology? The
questions aren’t new, but by bringing four major disciplines under one
tent—literally—Harvard is creating a new strain of dialogue, one which
just might be able to keep up with the crush
of the crowd.
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