KOLKATA: The West Bengal government has assigned nine senior IPS officers with experience in handling Durga Puja crowds to crowd-control duties across Kolkata, days after a stampede at the Chorbagan Durga Puja pandal left 19 people dead and about 25 injured. The move signals a sweeping overhaul of the city's festival crowd-management apparatus as lakhs of devotees continue to pour into pandals through the festive week.
The officers have been handpicked for their past exposure to large-scale Durga Puja crowd management, a skill that is in sharp demand this year. Durga Puja, Bengal's largest festival, draws enormous footfalls to hundreds of pandals across the city, with popular marquees in central Kolkata routinely seeing queues stretch several kilometres.
Managing that volume requires officers who understand the rhythm of festival crowds — how quickly a slow-moving queue can turn into a crush when rain, a VIP movement, or a sudden surge disrupts the flow.
The nine officers deployed are Sumanjit Ray, Inspector General of the Border; Mehmud Akhtar, IG of the Intelligence Branch; Miraj Khalid, IG of Traffic; Rupesh Kumar, Deputy Inspector General of the Special Task Force; Shubhankar Bhattacharya, DIG of Traffic; Tarun Haldar, DIG of the Criminal Investigation Department; Soumya Ray, Senior Superintendent of the Economic Offences Wing; Priyabrata Ray, Superintendent of Police of Traffic; and Deepak Sarkar, Senior Superintendent of the CID.
The deployment comes alongside an 11-point advisory issued by Kolkata Police for puja organisers, a checklist aimed at fixing the lapses investigators believe contributed to the Chorbagan tragedy. The advisory directs organisers to close entry points when it rains, ensure adequate lighting around pandals, keep VIP vehicles away from pandal zones, and make sure deployed personnel remain at their posts even during downpours.
Rain has long been a complicating factor at Kolkata's pandals. October showers are common during the Puja season, and wet conditions routinely alter crowd behaviour — entry ramps become slippery, covered areas fill up faster as visitors seek shelter, and the sudden rush toward sheltered enclosures can create dangerous pressure at narrow gates.
By explicitly instructing organisers to shut entries during rain, the police are addressing a scenario festival veterans say has caused near-misses year after year.
The advisory's instruction that personnel stay at their posts even in rain is equally significant. In past festivals, heavy showers have thinned out on-ground deployment as staff took shelter, leaving crowd-control points unmanned at exactly the moment they were most needed. The new directive closes that gap.
Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, meanwhile, indicated that the practice of VIP gates at pandals may be scrapped altogether. VIP entrances have been a long-running controversy at Kolkata's major pandals. Separate access lanes for dignitaries and their vehicles routinely disrupt the regular flow of devotees, creating bottlenecks where the VIP route intersects the public queue.
Devotees often complain that VIP movements bring the entire crowd system to a standstill, and crowd-management experts have repeatedly flagged these disruptions as a crush risk. Scrapping the practice, if implemented, would mark one of the most significant structural reforms to the city's festival protocol in years.
A special inspection team has also begun touring major pandals to assess safety preparedness firsthand. The team is led by Disaster Management Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh, Fire Services Director General Anuj Sharma, and STF Additional Director General Javed Shamim. The team visited Santosh Mitra Square — one of Kolkata's most high-profile pandals, known for drawing some of the largest crowds in the city — along with several other venues.
Santosh Mitra Square's inclusion in the inspection route is telling. The marquee, situated in a congested central Kolkata neighbourhood, attracts enormous turnouts every year, and its crowd-management arrangements are watched closely by the administration. Having the state's disaster management chief, the fire services head, and a senior STF officer walk the venue together underscores how seriously the government is treating the risk of a repeat tragedy.
The administrative response runs parallel to the criminal investigation into the Chorbagan stampede itself. Seven people connected with the event's management have been remanded to ten days of police custody. They are puja committee secretary Rajkumar Seoda, vice-president Shantanu Dubey, Biplab Mukhopadhyay, crowd managers Kaushik Saha and Pintu De, and security staff Suman Chakraborty and Rajesh Pal.
The list of those in custody reflects the breadth of the accountability net. Investigators are looking not only at the organising committee's leadership but also at the professional crowd managers hired for the event and the private security personnel deployed on the ground. The remand gives police ten days to question the accused on the planning, staffing, and on-ground decisions made before and during the stampede.
In a separate administrative action, the officer-in-charge of the Girish Park police station has been removed. Girish Park station has jurisdiction over the area where the Chorbagan pandal stands, and the removal signals that the state government is holding local police leadership accountable for the lapses that preceded the disaster.
The Chorbagan stampede has already triggered a wider reckoning over festival safety in Kolkata. For decades, the city's Durga Puja has grown bigger and more crowded, with pandals competing to draw record footfalls. Organisers invest heavily in elaborate themes and decorations, and a pandal's prestige is often measured by the size of the crowds it attracts.
That competitive dynamic has historically pushed safety considerations to the background, with entry infrastructure, lighting, and crowd-flow planning struggling to keep pace with the swelling numbers.
The deployment of nine officers of the rank of Superintendent and above — including three Inspectors General — is an unusual step that conveys the scale of the crisis response. Officers of this seniority are typically not tasked with on-ground crowd management, and their presence at festival duty is expected to tighten coordination between the police, the fire services, and the pandal committees.
Observers say the coming days will test whether the reforms hold. Durga Puja's busiest days — when the largest crowds visit — are still ahead, and the effectiveness of the 11-point advisory, the senior officer deployment, and the proposed end of VIP gates will be judged in real time, on streets packed with devotees.
For now, the message from the state government is unambiguous: the Chorbagan deaths have changed the operating rules of Kolkata's biggest festival, and the accountability will run from the pandal gate to the police station.
(Reporting based on PTI and NDTV.)