Bihar Nalanda Temple Stampede Latest News: A stampede at the Maa Sheetla Mandir in the Maghra village of Bihar’s Nalanda on Tuesday (March 31) led to the deaths of eight women. Officials told The Indian Express that further action and investigation are underway.

A source claimed that as the number of visitors at the temple rose, barricades at the location came under pressure. With no effective crowd management measures in place, panic ensued, leading to people pushing one another and falling.

Instances of stampedes in India typically unfold at places of worship, sporting events, railway stations, and at large-scale gatherings such as the Maha Kumbh. The year 2025 saw around 90 people losing their lives in such crowd crushes.

Rallies, sporting events, railway stations

Last June, the RCB victory celebration of the team’s IPL win in Bengaluru led to a stampede near the approach road to Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, leading to at least a dozen lives being lost.

The likely trigger included a lack of planning, coordination issues, indecision over allowing a victory parade and rumours of free passes, something that the cricket authorities subsequently denied. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said in his comments just after the incident that the police failed to estimate the size of the crowd that gathered outside the stadium.

In early May 2025, multiple people were killed in a stampede in Goa’s Shirgaon village, where devotees had gathered in a religious yatra at Shree Lairai Devi Temple.

On January 29, 30 people were killed, and over 60 were injured in an early morning stampede at the Sangam area of the Kumbh as pilgrims rushed in to take a dip on the occasion of Mauni Amavasya, an auspicious day in the Hindu calendar. Inadequate crowd control measures were cited as part of the reason for the incident.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s report titled ‘Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India,’ from 2000 to 2022, 3,074 lives had been lost in stampedes. Nearly 4,000 stampede events have been recorded over the last three decades. The NCRB has been collecting data on stampede incidents across India since 1996.

Not that these events do not happen elsewhere. Over the years, Mecca has witnessed stampedes during the Hajj pilgrimage. In 2015, according to the official Saudi account, two large groups of pilgrims intersected from different directions onto the same street. While the Saudi figures put the death toll at 769, news agencies such as Reuters and AP claim that over 2,000 pilgrims were killed.

In 2022, Halloween celebrations in South Korea resulted in a stampede, while in Germany, in 2010, a devastating “Love Parade” crush unfolded. The difference, though, is that these events typically are not allowed to recur, as authorities learn from the odd incidents and put in place remedial measures.

It needs to be mentioned, though, that in India, the scale of all these events is always much larger than in most other parts of the world. Another issue is a general disregard towards rules and regulations, which is a societal phenomenon in India.

According to Anna Sieben, a professor at the University of Wuppertal in Germany who has been researching crowd dynamics, a big problem is that people in such events often do not realise anything is wrong until it is too late.

Sieben, a social and cultural psychologist who uses experimental methods as well as qualitative interviews, observation and archival data in her work on crowds and pedestrians, has said that “individuals in crowds often communicate and orient themselves through non-verbal cues, such as body language”.

It has been convincingly shown that “mental states in crowds do not spread like wildfire, but emotions actually change depending on the situation and the behaviour of others,” she wrote. That transmission happens faster if the crowds are densely packed, given that the sense of personal space is a lot more negotiable in India than elsewhere in the world.

Also, in a stampede, while some people might die due to trampling, a bigger trigger is compressive asphyxia, where pressure on the rib cage due to the sudden crush leads to impaired breathing. The initial cause is invariably asphyxia. But then someone may stumble and fall, resulting in a domino effect and others falling on top of the people who are down, which could then lead to more deaths on account of trampling.

A tightly packed gathering is a recipe for disaster, especially if the authorities have underestimated the crowd sizes or are ill-prepared to tackle a localised crush, which can then spread outwards in a gathering.